Amends, or Truth and Reconciliation
by Vera Rozalsky
Summary: Post-DH, Hermione confronts the post-war world, including the wizarding War Crimes Trials of 1999, rogue Dementors, werewolf packs, and Ministry intrigue. All is not well, and this is nothing new. Rated M for later chapters.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Author's notes: **This story is dedicated to the first Harry Potter fans I ever met, Michael Black and Margaret Black (no, not _that_ Black family. That I know of, at least.) It also owes innumerable debts--more than can be enumerated without the use of footnotes--to the fan-fiction writers Arsinoe de Blessenville (see my Favorites) and A.J. Hall (of 'Lust Over Pendle' fame), both of whose work is marked by an appreciation for the complexity of life, love, and politics, among wizards and muggles alike.

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Sunday 3 May 1998**

Now that the war is over, I have things to do. Let's see…

To do this afternoon:

1. Sort out the contents of the blue beaded bag. I've lost track of what's in there.

2. Have a bath and a nice lie-in.

Mark the date:

Monday 11 May – Order of Merlin awards ceremony. (Find the periwinkle dress robes. My hair looks a fright. I think Bellatrix singed it when she was firing curses at me. Talk to Fleur… she might know something to do about it.)

To do next week (starting Monday 11 May 1998):

1. Talk to Headmistress McGonagall about setting a date for the NEWTs

2. Retrieve my parents from Australia

3. Reverse the Memory Charm on my parents

That should be straightforward. Once I'm done with that, I can get on with the rest of it.

To do this summer:

1. Get a job with the Ministry

2. Reform the Ministry (not sure about the timeline for this one; may not be finished by September)

At some point Ron and I will get married, I suppose, but that's not on the timeline yet. I have to get the other things sorted before I can think about that.

*******

After the war, they all went out for a drink.

Hermione thinks this is the last moment when victory looked uncomplicated. They went out to celebrate after the Order of Merlin awards ceremony, all four of them in one of the private rooms at the Three Broomsticks, at their own table with multiple rounds of firewhiskey on the house. Acknowledged grown-ups for the first time, _heroes. _Harry pulled over an extra chair and made a fifth place and wrote out a place tag for Dumbledore. Ron wrote one each for everybody else.

Neville was still surprised by the award, to say the least. (Perhaps "thunderstruck" or "gobsmacked" might be more accurate.) He sat there holding his drink and shaking his head. It was just a snake, and Harry had told him to kill the snake. "Nothing complicated about that," he said.

So the three of them explained to him that he'd been part of the Horcrux Disposal Squad. She doesn't remember who came up with that name, but they all thought it was really funny, especially after the first round. Firewhiskey goes to your head fast. The remains of her analytic brain said, "That's not alcohol, or just alcohol; it's a mind-altering potion."

It seemed the height of wit to pretend that they've been on a prolonged scavenger hunt, and they laughed even harder when Ron unfolded his place card and started writing out a scorecard on the back. Who got what. With appropriate house points.

"Killing off a piece of Voldemort ought to be good for about a thousand points, don't you think?" he said. "Neville got the snake and Hermione got the cup and I got the locket and Dumbledore got the ring and Harry nailed the diary _and_ the little piece of Ultimate Evil he had been carrying around."

He stopped for a moment. "Eccch! So I was rooming with Voldemort all that time!" By now, they were drunk enough to find that uproariously funny. Well, at least Ron and Harry thought it was funny. Hermione and Neville looked at each other without comment as the two boys slapped each other on the back and collapsed onto the table and then sat up wiping the tears from their cheeks.

Ron did the subtotal. "So that's five thousand points to Gryffindor, allowing as Dumbledore was Headmaster and shouldn't be included in house rivalries."

It only got ugly when they start talking about the diadem. Harry insisted that he only _collected_ it and it fell apart in his hands once they got clear of the fire in the Room of Requirement. "The Fiendfyre got it," he said, turning to Hermione. "You said so at the time."

"Crabbe set the fire," she said.

Ron bridled at the idea that Crabbe should get credit for killing a Horcrux, because he didn't turn loose the Fiendfyre with that idea in mind.

Harry said that if you reasoned that way, then _he _shouldn't get credit for the diary, because he didn't know he was killing a Horcrux when he stabbed it with the basilisk fang.

Ron gave in, but not with good grace. He added another line to the Horcrux score card: "Diadem. Vincent Crabbe, Slytherin House. 500 points."

"'And let it be noted that Slytherin House played its part! Let our contribution not be forgotten!'" he said, in pitch-perfect imitation of Professor Slughorn's mellow tones. Hermione noted to herself, not for the first time, that Ron held grudges forever. He hadn't forgotten that Slughorn never considered him collectible enough for his little club.

Harry picked up the scorecard and squinted at it. He was drunk enough to be working very carefully on giving the impression of sobriety. "Why only 500 points?"

"Five hundred points _deducted_ for trying to kill us all." Ron paused. "And for being nasty unforgivable little wankers, every last one of them." He downed the rest of his drink and waved for another round.

He raised his glass for a toast.

"To the post-war!"

Hermione accepted a refill, but didn't raise her glass. She sipped at it, feeling dizzy and more than a little sick, then looked across to Neville, who seemed to be having a similar reaction. After a little bit, she put her glass down, and said, "No more for me. I don't want to splinch myself Apparating home."

Ron took her glass and dumped the remains into his own.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Wednesday 13 May 1998**

I had _that_ dream again last night. Maybe if I write it down, that will tame it.

How to write about it?

A brief essay on the Cruciatus Curse, turned in for Defense Against the Dark Arts two years too late.

Cruciatus is efficiency itself. The curse turns your whole nervous system into a vehicle for pain. It usurps the network to transmit agony. If prolonged, it overloads the circuits until the central processor burns, melts, flares blue and dims down never to transmit anything again.

I don't dream the pain so much as the sense of violation. When I hear Greyback's voice asking if he can have me "for afters," I don't know if he meant fangs or rape. Luckily, I never learned which. _Maybe both._

In twilight between waking and sleep some little voice picks at the question like a raw scab: so how does that curse work? How did anyone ever discover it? Did they always use it for this purpose? There are no citations in the literature.

It's Dark because you're channeling not only power but intention, your desire for another's pain. Bellatrix is dead as dead can be. I saw her die. I saw them shovel her into the grave. Every night since the war I meet her in dreams, and on her own ground. I'm afraid to sleep because I never escape that room. The chandelier hangs over me like rain arrested. She grasps me and pain pours out of my open throat.

Worst of all, what I didn't notice at the time but my dreams remember: her body twitches under mine in sexual release. My pain was her pleasure. And the watchers: her pale sister a blurred ghost and the sharp features and avid colorless eyes of her nephew. Draco. I bet that little bastard got off on it too, just like his evil aunt.

(Language, Granger.)

(Shut up. I'm a combat veteran. I'm entitled.)

I know he was there but I can't have really _seen_ him. I was hanging on to the lie I had to tell over and over. People under torture either break, or lie, or die. There are only three choices and they can overlap. I lied.

And now I think I may be broken. I will never get out of that room.

I wake with sun on my face and Crookshanks nuzzling me with his furry golden muzzle and I'm shaking with terror. I should be grateful to be alive. I wake into my lovely normal post-war life and the cozy chaos of the Burrow and I already dread the evening when I'll go back to that room again.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger **

**Friday 15 May 1998**

After the war is quite different from the way I thought it would be.

In particular, it is lonelier.

Last night, I dreamed about Tonks. She was meeting me in London, at that little café that my parents liked, the one where Dean and I had tea and biscuits last week and talked about breathing free for the first time. In the dream, of course, I didn't remember my last sight of her, lying dead in the Great Hall. They had placed her next to Remus, or she had fallen there. I like to think that they died fighting back to back.

Bellatrix killed her. Her own aunt. Pruning the family tree, that's the phrase I heard her use. Bellatrix is dead too (thank you, Molly Weasley nee Prewett), but not before killing her beautiful niece. I closed Tonks' eyes for the last time. I don't remember their color any more because they were reflecting the cloudless morning sky over the Great Hall.

In the dream, none of that had happened, and I was meeting her in London at my parents' favorite café, to celebrate the post-war. In the dream, I was happy because now I was an adult, a warrior, and I could meet Tonks on her own ground, not as a star-struck fifteen-year-old. She came into the café, black t-shirt and ripped jeans and pink hair flaming like a one-woman fireworks display, and I stood up to greet her. I put my arms around her and she disappeared into a column of light: pink fading into opal, flickering with jade and ultramarine and finally searing white. Gone.

Not that I would have greeted her like that in waking life. But the dream made me realize that I had been looking forward to meeting her _after the war,_ and maybe getting to know the only adult woman I've met here whose life is anything I would want to live. She had such an ease about her, the way she'd laugh at her own clumsiness and at Moody's lectures on constant vigilance and at the threat of death. And I remembered my ferocious jealousy, the end of sixth year, when it came out that she had been in love with Remus and courting him… and it took me till now to understand whence that jealousy.

I remember my third-year crush on Remus. I told nobody. I knew better. Harry and Ron, but especially Ron, gave me enough trouble about my infatuation with Lockhart our second year. _That _one was a mistake but a mercy. It cured me of the taste for pretty men. Remus was unassuming and not particularly handsome, but he knew his stuff. The anti-Lockhart, I thought. But I wasn't jealous of Tonks for getting Remus. Rather the other way around. I wanted her attention, fiercely wanted it, and it's too late to tease out what of that was hero-worship or romantic infatuation or the desire for a grown-up woman friend. The fifteen-year-old who felt all that is as dead as Tonks herself.

Tonks was nearly the last of the Blacks--in the renegade line anyway. Sirius and his brother are dead. Without great regret, their cousin Bellatrix the pureblood fanatic is gone as well. Tonks' mother Andromeda survived, and then there's Teddy who won't even remember his parents. Two left standing—grandmother and grandson.

Oh yes, and in the respectable line there's Narcissa. But I scarcely count her. Funny that I count Bellatrix and Andromeda as the Black sisters but I never think of Narcissa that way. She's Andromeda's sister and Tonks' aunt but I really think of her as Narcissa Malfoy--Draco's mother and Lucius' wife.

Tonks and Draco were first cousins. Now _that's_ a thought to wrap your head around. I can't even imagine them in the same family let alone the same room. All of his sneering and snarking and competitiveness would have rolled off her; she didn't take anything very seriously except for the important things, and she would have driven him to distraction because he would never have found purchase for any of his usual attacks. He has a sense of humor, but I've never seen him exercise it except at someone else's expense. Tonks laughed at everything, including herself; I've never met anyone more at ease in their own skin. Very disarming, perhaps intentionally so. She was colorful and changeable, with her kaleidoscope of faces; he is monochrome and fixed, frantically rigid in fact. She was the renegade daughter of a renegade daughter; he's the favored son of an aristocratic father. Funny that the renegade should have been so much more confident than the respectable heir.

She was bright and brave and clumsy and she had a beloved husband and a small child, and she_ died._ In battle. Draco, the nasty little bully and coward, walked out of there unscathed—no little thanks to Harry and Ron and me. I wish I'd spent the effort on saving Tonks. Had Draco died I think only his mother and father would have cared, and I wonder if his father's regret would have been more for the Malfoy line than for his son in particular. Tonks is missed by everybody. Particularly me.

The very least I can do in her memory is to live out the things I admired in her: the courage, the joy, the pursuit of her calling.

Which isn't easy these days, with Ron and Molly ganging up to turn me into a Weasley daughter-in-law even before we get married. Molly gave me an end-of-the-war present: a compendium of housekeeping spells. It took all my effort to smile and thank her.

Then Ron wanted to know what meal I was going to cook him and would I tweak his dress robes into something more fashionable.

I told him he'd sat through the same charms and transfiguration classes I had, and he could look up the necessary in Molly's big book.

That got me sulks from Ron and a look from Molly. On the other hand, when I _do_ act like his mother, he tells me I'm a nagging shrew.

Then he changed course yet again, talking about how cute Teddy is (though I notice he's conspicuously absent when nappies are to be changed) and how our children will look. It isn't helped by Harry and Ginny talking about their engagement and their marriage plans. They're already planning to have three or more children. Molly beams approval at them.

I am eighteen-going-on-nineteen, not a desperate thirty. I don't want to get married. Not yet. I'm not even finished with my education, and I've seen precious little of the world. I still have to bring my parents back, undo that memory charm and restore their lives so far as I can. And after that—relax and enjoy the post-war, for all its unexpected emptiness.

_Girls just wanna have fun._ My mother danced with me to that American pop song in our kitchen, years and years ago, when I couldn't have been more than seven. A surprisingly unbuttoned moment, which must be why I remember it. That's my anthem for the post-war: _girls just wanna have fun, _sung by Cyndi Lauper, and ghost-danced by Nymphadora Tonks and my mother.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Posting schedule:** I am posting the first two chapters of _Amends, or Truth and Reconciliation_ at the end of November 2009. Chapters will be posted weekly thereafter.

*******

**Third week of May 1998**

At Hogwarts, they have cleared most of the rubble. On the way in, she passes Neville on his way to the greenhouses and he says to look him up after her meeting with McGonagall. She tells him that she's meeting Ron and Harry later and he can come along if he likes.

This feels reassuringly normal, although she notices that Neville is most of the way out of uniform. He's wearing shabby Hogwarts robes open over Muggle work clothes and there's a smudge of dirt on his forehead, no doubt from rubbing it with a dusty hand earlier. He's been out in the sun; his previous subterranean paleness is gone and there's even a patch of sunburn across his nose. He hasn't trimmed his shaggy hair, but tied it back with an impromptu ribbon--very impromptu; it's no more than a ragged scrap of cloth, whose edges are visibly fraying.

He smiles and pats her on the shoulder by way of farewell and she walks down the hall toward the still-ruined staircase that leads to the Headmistress' office, feeling that something at least is right with the world.

Then her stomach goes cold, because there's Malfoy-the-younger standing in the corridor staring at her. He's wearing impeccable school robes and his silver prefect's badge as if nothing had happened, as if there had been no war and things were as they had ever been. She squares her shoulders and stares back; she's not going to drop her gaze even if this is a figure from her nightmares. He's thinner than she remembers, which makes him seem taller and emphasizes the resemblance to his father: white-blond hair, pale brows, colorless grey eyes, thin lips and austere bone structure. Pointy-faced, Harry calls him. The black robes emphasize all of this and Hermione thinks: he's as close to monochrome as a human being can get. If you cut him, the blood would run clear.

Abruptly she remembers a black-and-white film she saw with her father, years ago, and in it was a young man like this in a black and silver uniform—the lightning bolts of the SS on the insignia. Oh yes, this is what they must have looked like: very sure of their own superiority and completely inhuman. Then she's furious—how _dare_ he stand there lording it over her, when he's already watched her being tortured. Some of her fury must show on her face and in the tension of the hand that automatically closes over her wand; he drops his gaze and turns and walks away quickly as if he's just remembered something important elsewhere. His hair is long, too, like his father's, and it's tied with a black and silver ornament.

What a nasty piece of work, she thinks, not for the first time.

She turns and goes up the staircase.

***

The war is over, and Hermione has dealt with item number one on the List of Things to Do: "Talk to Headmistress McGonagall about setting a date for the NEWTs." They had a nice crisp sensible talk about academic options. McGonagall was quite sure that none of the students in Hermione's year would have to do NEWTs in two weeks. The academic validity of the past year is currently under review, and the extensive structural repairs to the castle are still in progress. In any case, given the extended hiatus from academics while fighting Ultimate Evil, it would be most advisable for Hermione, Ron, and Harry to wait until the next academic year.

Hermione had been relieved at this, because she had already been mentally juggling the calendar to allow for two weeks of intensive study, if need be. So she moved on the other things on the List of Things to Do, namely "Retrieve My Parents From Australia" and "Reverse the Memory Charm." She'd been a little uneasy about this, because she'd gotten used to operating without adult supervision and now she felt like a student again, decorated war hero or not. The Great Horcrux Hunt had been a rogue operation that notably lacked a faculty advisor. _Sub rosa_ directives from the late Headmaster probably didn't count.

McGonagall frowns. "What memory charm?"

Hermione has the book ready. "The one on page 57 here. After the basic Obliviate."

"And you followed these directions?"

"To the letter. I wanted it to hold up indefinitely in case I didn't come back. I was more worried about Voldemort tracking them down than how complicated it would be to reverse. Well, and I had to do a little Muggle-style Glamour, too, and that took time. I actually started _that_ work the summer before last."

"How do the Muggles do a Glamour?"

She waves vaguely. "With databases, you know. Public records. I didn't kill off the Grangers, of course. I just added the Wilkinses, gave them dental degrees, got them passports and visas for Australia, and did the appropriate transfers of funds. The house here is still in the Grangers' name, and it's paid for. As soon as the memory charm is reversed, Wendell and Monica Wilkins can step back into their old identities. "

McGonagall looks at her appraisingly. "This really isn't my field, you know."

Hermione clears her throat nervously. "Well, I was reading the description of the reversal process and I think there are some details missing. Tradecraft, I think. The kind of thing they don't necessarily think to put in the book."

_Here comes the hard part._

"I don't think I'm qualified to do this. I don't want to make a mistake. I _can't_ make a mistake. They're my parents."

McGonagall looks at her. Hermione is rapidly developing the conviction that she's in deep trouble. It's confirmed by the dryness of the reply.

"This particular charm is beyond the scope of most field Aurors. Reversing it, more so. You are prudent to seek expert counsel." She Summons a small oblong parchment from one of the files, writes a quick note on the reverse, and hands it to Hermione. It's a business card. "I'll send her an Owl right now. She'll be in touch with you."

Hermione looks at the card.

_Boudicca Derwent, Senior Healer_

_Department of Spell Damage_

_St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries_

This does not look good. Hermione smiles stiffly and nods.

"Thank you, Headmistress. I really appreciate this."

They rise and shake hands. Hermione tucks the card in the pocket of her robes and walks down the ruined staircase from the Headmistress's office.

***

She has two hours before she's meeting Ron and Harry in Hogsmeade. She's hesitating between a walk around the castle hallways or the inviting spring sunlight outside when, down a hallway, she hears shouting, loud bangs, and over the uproar, Neville's voice.

_That's some really inexpert spellwork, _she thinks. _Didn't we learn first year that flashes and bangs do not a wizard make? _She laughs at herself because she's about to add the observation that kids these days don't catch on as quickly and standards have slipped. And then decides it's not funny at all, because standards really _did_ slip last year.

_Well, I'm sure Neville is sorting them out. Maybe when he's done, we can take a walk and get caught up._ As she approaches the corner, the bangs continue, and Neville is repeating whatever he said before. She can't make out the words, but the tone is unmistakable: _I'm saying it again and I mean it._

_Rather like the tone he took with Voldemort. Call me interfering, but I'll see if he needs backup. _She turns the corner. At the end of the hall there's a pack of students shouting and throwing hexes, and Neville is facing them and shielding someone who's down on the ground. He makes eye contact with her to indicate that yes, backup is welcome.

"The war is over!" he says. "And if you want it to stay over, you'll clear out now."

Hermione steps up, wand out. "He's said it three times that I've heard," she says. "What does it take for you lot to listen?"

They turn and stare at her. She recognizes a few faces, but everyone's changed so much in the last year. What stands out is that half of them are wearing Muggle clothes under open Hogwarts robes, and the other half aren't wearing their school robes at all. No question that they recognize her. They mutter among themselves, but lower their wands. She's pretty sure it's not her personal authority but the fact that they're caught between two acknowledged master duelists.

"Clear out," Hermione repeats, making lots of eye contact. They shuffle off, throwing her resentful backward glances. Once they're out of sight, she turns to help Neville with the victim, whose face and hair are covered in blood. The robes are torn—so damaged, in fact, that as Neville assists him to a sitting position they drop away leaving his right side bare to the hip. Scratches, deep ones, stretch all down the right arm. Hermione averts her eyes while doing _Reparo_ on the robes_; _she wouldn't want to be exposed like that. Must be one of the Purebloods; she still doesn't understand why it's a point of sartorial honor to wear nothing under the robes. Maybe to show off how brilliant they are with warming charms in the Scottish winter; she's always preferred the option of a few extra layers of clothes.

"No broken bones at least," Neville says. "I'll get him to the hospital wing; could you get his things?" She looks up and sees the scattered papers, a book with pages torn out, over in the corner a wand. She feels sick, not sure if she's more disturbed by the glassy, averted stare, the trembling hands or the violated book. She gathers them up, and Neville says, "And don't forget the hair; I don't need anyone playing games with Polyjuice." She picks up the hank of pale blond hair, still tied with a silver and black clasp just below where it must have been hacked off at the nape.

She stands up with the things under her arm, then realizes that she has no idea where to take them. Neville sees her confusion and indicates with a nod that she should follow him. "Wand out," he says. "Cover me. In case they come back."

"It's all right," he's saying, in his deep reassuring voice, "can you walk?" The other boy is standing, protectively hunched; the top of his head only comes up to Neville's chin. _Neville is a very large man,_ she thinks. _How did I not notice that before?_ Neville apparently decides that walking is not the best option, and picks him up to carry him like a child.

The hospital wing is deserted when they arrive. Neville calls, "Madam Pomfrey?" but there's no answer. "Oh, she must still be at the apothecary in Hogsmeade," he says, and proceeds to stride in and deposit his burden on the nearest bed. "Here, sit down. I'll wash the blood off. I think this is just a scalp wound. They look horrible, though." He rinses water over the bowed head into a basin. Hermione is startled that he's making himself at home here.

"Don't worry, she's used to this. I helped out here during the war," he says. "I wouldn't have gotten everyone through the Carrows' detentions without some professional backup."

From under the curtain of wet hair, there's a terrible retching sound and a rain of slugs plops into the basin.

"I _hate_ that hex," Neville says conversationally, and flicks his wand. He walks his broad fingertips through the dripping hair, examining the scalp. "Ah, there we are, just a few little cuts. Be better in a minute." Another wave and murmur. He pauses to check that no more slugs are forthcoming, then sets the basin aside and pulls down a towel to carefully dry the head and shoulders; under the towel, the boy relaxes like a child after a bath, leaning into Neville's chest.

Neville reaches to the bedside table for the bottle of rubbing alcohol, gently rolls the right sleeve to the shoulder, cleans the deep scratches, then does another flick of the wand. Hermione is amused at the odd mix of magical and Muggle in Neville's first aid technique, and impressed at his confident gentleness.

The pale hands are shaking less now, and the one nearest her reaches out blindly and closes on hers with an iron grip. She relaxes so that he'll get the idea that he's safe. Neville finishes drying the boy's head and shoulders, disengages the towel, and gently lies him down.

Hermione says, "We'll wait with you here until Madam Pomfrey comes."

At the sound of her voice, Draco Malfoy turns his face to her and opens his eyes and stares at her with that blazing look that recalls Bellatrix. _How dare he,_ she thinks.

Rage boils and towers in a split-second into a tropical thunderhead livid with lightning like the wild magic of her childhood. If he says so much as _one word,_ particularly _that word,_ if he even sneers, she will discharge that power into the green light of the Killing Curse. She will fill the entire room with lethal force and bring down this whole wing of the castle.

It's only the thought that Neville will be killed too that keeps her from effortlessly letting loose.

"It's all right," Neville says, and at that Draco sighs and closes his eyes again. Unbelievably, he doesn't pull away, and she feels his hand relax in hers. Hermione breathes again, feeling dizzy.

She and Neville sit opposite each other and listen to Draco's shallow breathing and the outdoor sounds that filter in from the windows. Neville has a gift for restful silence, and Hermione loses track of time as they sit companionably waiting for Madam Pomfrey to return. Hermione thinks about the List of Things to Do, and wonders how long it will take to get her parents back. She had imagined it as a few simple steps: locating the Wilkinses in Australia, getting her tourist visa for Australia, getting on the plane, finding them there, undoing the memory charm, and then flying back. She had debated with herself about whether to buy return tickets for them, but then thought they'd have affairs to wrap up in Australia. After all, they'd been there for almost a year already.

She remembers the last conversation they had with her as themselves. "Don't worry about us, dear," her mother had said. "We'll land on our feet." It was very odd, because they were reassuring her that they'd be safe on their adventure, which felt like _her _lines.

She had outlined for them one last time the layers of the memory charm, and asked them if they were sure they wanted to go through with this. Those would have been _their_ lines, perhaps to their patients. Informed consent. Exploration of treatment options. The summer after her fifth year, she had sat down with them and told them about the return of Voldemort. What struck them most forcefully was the fate of Neville's parents: tortured until they lost their minds. Her parents had met Neville, very much in passing, and it seems that a piece of the puzzle has clicked into place for them ("Such a nice quiet boy," her mother had said, "but not much at ease in the world.") That's when they began _exploring treatment options._ "Better safe than sorry," her mother said.

They chose the safest option, which of course was the most complex, layers of fallback defenses and secret rooms where the true memories were hidden. The common nomenclature calls this a "memory charm," but in a sense it's the very opposite of the simple _Obliviate_. That's subtraction, and this is addition. You hide the true memories in another place, lock them up tight, then create a complicated structure that _replaces _them. Monica and Wendell are the people her parents would have been if they hadn't had a child. It's the magical equivalent of writing a novel. By the time she was done, she'd accomplished the strange feat of living in a world in which she had never existed.

Neville reaches across the hospital bed and touches her shoulder. "She's here," he says. Draco stirs in his sleep, but doesn't relinquish her hand. "I'll talk to her."

"So sorry—unavoidable delay," she hears Madam Pomfrey say, and then Neville is talking, in a low neutral voice not meant to be overheard, no doubt giving her the background on Draco's situation and the injuries already treated.

"That's good news at least," Madam Pomfrey says, which strikes Hermione as odd until she hears the next bit. "His friend wasn't so lucky. Someone hit her with a curse in the High Street in Hogsmeade. She bled to death before we could find something to stop it. None of the usual measures worked."

"Do they know what curse it was?" Neville asks.

"Sectumsempra. That Dark spell of Snape's. I had been hoping everyone had forgotten about that one."

***

**Author's notes:** Some details of the assault on Draco are based on treatment of WWII French collaborators; the idea for the incident and Neville's role in it comes from Dendraica's artwork 'The War is Over'. See dendraica (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/The-War-Is-Over-81308709


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

** *****

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – third week of May)**

Everyone is asleep now. I'm writing by wandlight. I can hear the Burrow creaking in its sleep, and I imagine I hear the breathing of everyone asleep in this much-inhabited house. We're doubled and tripled up since the war, with Andromeda and Teddy here and Harry rooming with Ron and Dean and me sharing a room with Ginny and Luna.

I can't sleep so I will write.

After Madam Pomfrey arrived, she gave Draco a good dose of Dreamless Sleep and he passed out rather heavily and instantly so I could finally get my hand back. All of that angel-of-mercy stuff is vastly overrated, like most things that look good in paintings. The first thing I did was run down the hall to the loo. Then Neville and I took a long walk.

We walked around the lake a couple of times without talking. It was late afternoon and if you looked in the right direction, it was an ordinary spring day at Hogwarts. Students were sitting out on the grass, and a few were circling over the Quidditch pitch on brooms. If you looked in the wrong direction, you saw the ruins.

Then Neville explained to me who Draco's attackers were. War orphans. Hogwarts students whose families were killed by the Death Eaters. That's one of the reasons they didn't close the school. There's nowhere for the kids to go.

There are no wizarding orphanages.

Joke shops, yes, but no orphanages.

Neville knows all of those kids; he recited their names and what happened to their parents and what was done to them this year. He told me that the ringleader was the little girl with the pigtails, a second-year Hufflepuff. Wilhelmina something. I didn't even _see_ her; I was concentrating on facing down the bigger boys. He told me about how he cleaned her up after Crabbe Crucio'd her in detention. Nobody else wanted to do it. Blood didn't unnerve them anymore but shit was too much. And Crabbe thought it was really, really funny so he did it to her more than once. Neville shrugged and said, "Well, it doesn't bother me. I help out with my parents, you know."

Then he told me what the kids had been doing to Draco.

What they were doing was

Here's what he said

This is almost impossible to write down even though I can still hear his words.

Especially after Ron yelled at me for being three hours late to meet him. At first it was fine because he was worried about me especially after the panic in Hogsmeade when they killed Pansy Parkinson. But when I told him about helping Neville in the hospital wing and that the patient was _Draco-sodding-Malfoy_ he yelled at me. I don't want to write down what he said in particular but the general drift was that the war isn't over for him and never will be and I had better be clear about what side I'm on.

I am shivering almost too hard to write.

He said Pansy deserved it because she was ready to hand over Harry to Voldemort.

I am not sure. I think she was scared and she let her mouth run away with her. She paid for it with a fairly nasty and painful death. Madam Pomfrey told me and Neville that the curse cut up her face and chest and throat; she was still trying to talk but you couldn't make it out through the bubbling blood. She is fairly certain that Pansy was asking for her mother and for Draco.

I don't want to think about

What I don't want to think about. Much better. A list. I like lists.

Who knows about Sectumsempra? Anybody that heard the original story from sixth year with all the juicy details of who threw what curse. Draco tried Cruciatus on Harry and Harry answered with Sectumsempra, and Draco almost bled to death.

It is in the nature of magic to run out of control. Most curses don't stay secret for long. The name of the weapon, and its intent, is the weapon itself. "Sectumsempra. For enemies." And wizarding folk are rotten at documentation. I don't think Snape wrote down _how_ to reverse it, or maybe Harry just didn't read to that part. In any case, that book is ashes on the wind now, and Snape is dead.

There are feral war orphans roaming the halls of Hogwarts. Neville says they set on Draco because he was an easy target. His parents are in Azkaban. He was a prefect again this year so they can blame him for what happened. He's visible, and alone. He dresses like a Pureblood aristocrat. He has the same attitude he ever did. Madam Pomfrey is keeping him in isolation in the hospital wing because it isn't clear he'll be safe anywhere else.

Most of the shouting wasn't hexes. They were telling him what they were going to do to him next, and everybody had a suggestion. Neville will not tell me the particulars. We caught them before they could finish shearing his hair and tearing off his clothes.

What I keep averting my eyes from and which therefore is engraved on memory.

What I saw: I recognized who it was. I recognized him as soon as I picked up the hair—who else has hair that color? Platinum. I stuffed that hank of hair in the pocket of my robes because it kept slithering to the floor and I didn't want to leave loose hairs lying around. I found it when I got home and it's sitting on my desk, like a keepsake. A lock of Draco Malfoy's hair, held in an onyx and silver clasp and crusted with blood where they cut off the queue as if they were amputating a limb.

Very pale hands against his black robes. His hands were loose on his thighs and they were shaking uncontrollably.

There were his books with pages torn out, scattered in front of him.

The glassy averted stare. The way that he turned his face away, into Neville's chest, when Neville was washing the blood out of his hair, as if he wanted to close his eyes and deny he was there at all. The ugly cut on the back of his neck that crossed the spine and ran up into the scalp, where they'd cut off his long hair and not particularly cared that they took skin as well.

My own averted glance, when Neville sat him up and the torn remnant of his robes fell to the floor and exposed him neck to hip, a horrible blinding expanse of bare skin. I remember the raw edge of his clavicle and how I'd never thought about him having a _body_ and still didn't want to_._ Neville fished for the torn edges of the cloth and draped it awkwardly over Draco's shoulder and I did the _Reparo_ without looking.

Oh yes, and Neville ordered, as we set off: "Wand out. Cover me." As if we were in a combat zone. He expected the attackers to return, and he didn't intend to leave the hospital wing until Madam Pomfrey came back.

In the hospital wing. Neville settled Draco back onto the pillows and he just flopped, bonelessly. I saw the vulnerable underside of his jaw as his head tipped back.

The succession of expressions on his face when he opened his eyes:

Utterly unfocused astonishment, and then the glare, the peasant-fear-me glare, and then the sneer or the beginning of it, which he almost didn't live to complete because that's when the rage flared and I could feel the killing curse begin to cast itself. Then his eyes opened very wide and his mouth too as if his death were coming at him from an unexpected quarter. And then I saw again Tonks' wide dead eyes reflecting the empty sky over the Great Hall. The bone structure of the nose and the eye sockets—that's what they have in common—and it may have been that kinship that saved him.

Then he grasped my hand so tightly I thought I would have bruises, and held it to his cheek, and _whimpered _like a five-year-old.

Neville said, "He had a concussion. That's why he kept falling asleep. And I don't think he recognized you except when he heard your voice."

"So who did he think I was?" I asked.

"His mother," Neville said. "When he took your hand. I saw him with his mother in the Great Hall and he was holding her hand like that, as if he were safe as long as she held on to him. When you tried to kill him, I suppose he thought you were Voldemort. Or maybe Bellatrix. He must know what the backwash of the Killing Curse feels like."

I sat quiet over that one a bit. Narcissa Malfoy and Tom Riddle and Bellatrix Lestrange. The last three people in the world anybody would mistake me for. His _mother,_ for Merlin's sake. Narcissa the ice queen. Except to Draco, Narcissa wasn't ice. She was mama, a warm lap, safe harbor.

I said, "I almost did a wandless Avada Kedavra on a helpless patient and you're still speaking to me." It scared me to say it aloud, as if saying it made it more real.

Neville said very quietly, "I was always afraid that would happen if I let any magic out at all. It took me years to stop being afraid of killing everyone around me."

Then I remembered abruptly that time in our fifth year when Malfoy made that smart remark about the closed ward in St. Mungo's and Neville lunged at him and it took Harry and Ron both to restrain him and they nearly didn't. Neville must have remembered the same thing because he said, "If I'd gotten to him, he wouldn't have had a face. I wanted to wipe his smirk off and I would have taken his face off to do it."

He dropped his voice even lower, so I had to strain to hear him. "When I heard that Fred Weasley was dead I was glad that I hadn't seen it. I would have wondered forever if _I'd_ really been the one who got him." He whispered, "I spent more time dreaming about killing him and George than I ever spent on Malfoy. Everybody thought their jokes were so funny, especially when they were on me."

***

**Fourth week of May 1998**

It's a rainy Tuesday when Hermione Apparates to the alley outside the entrance to St. Mungo's. She's two hours early for her appointment with Boudicca Derwent, less from punctiliousness than from a desperate desire to find herself anywhere but the Burrow that morning.

She is still disturbed by the argument she had last night with Ron about the situation at Hogwarts. He isn't particularly disturbed that someone seems to have declared open season on the seventh-year Slytherins. Gregory Goyle is dead too, another Sectumsempra killing, as is Blaise Zabini. Millicent Bulstrode is unaccounted for. Ron's argument seems to be that they would or should have ended up in Azkaban, and in the good old days it would have been the Dementor's Kiss. This way is cleaner: no drooling shells to warehouse.

He doesn't understand Neville's worries about the roving gangs of orphaned students. "We got up to pranks when we were in school," he says. Never mind that McGonagall and Pomfrey both reacted to the attack on Draco with identical looks of grim resolve and proceeded to bend the rules to keep him safe.

The worst was that after the argument, Ron wanted to kiss and cuddle, and he was annoyed because she wasn't interested. Well, she could see his point, given that he'd arranged for Harry and Dean to be elsewhere for the evening and privacy is at a premium at the Burrow these days. Molly seems to be a little less vigilant about the young folk sneaking off together of an evening, but Hermione suspects this is because she assumes weddings are just around the corner. It doesn't take great subtlety to discern this, as she makes fond eyes at Arthur over the crowded family table and talks about the breathless days of their elopement during the First War Against Voldemort.

Hermione has never felt less romantic or domestic in her life. She had quite enough of domesticity on her extended camping trip. Between Ron's notion that a noisy argument is some form of foreplay and his expectation that somebody owes him home-cooked meals and clean laundry, she finds that she's feeling decidedly less romantic once they're alone.

She really should have known better than to have tried to talk to him about her nightmares and her disturbing flares of rage. First he wanted to write it off to female hormones and time of the month.

She said, "This isn't _normal._ I almost AK'd Malfoy in the hospital wing, and he wasn't even giving me a particularly dirty look."

Ron looked at her and said "What's wrong with that?" Then he smirked and said, "Actually, Avada Kedavra's too good for him. Let's start another of your do-gooder societies. S.C.A.M.—Society to Crucio All Malfoys."

"You know, that might have been _almost_ funny when they were winning. But now it's just sick. They slammed Lucius and Narcissa up in Azkaban and I think they're probably going to make an example of them. Draco doesn't have a lot left except his stiff-necked pride and his smart mouth, and that's not going to get him far." She felt a momentary flash of gratitude to Neville for spelling that out for her.

She didn't add that he didn't find Crucio such a humorous idea when he was listening to her screams through the floorboards, but that's too close to the bone to use for point-scoring. Harry tells her that Ron wakes him up several times a week shouting her name. None of them are weathering the post-war particularly well. Harry is closemouthed about his own nightmares, but she suspects from the bruised look of the skin under his eyes that he's not doing very well either.

She stands for a bit in the lobby, looking at the portraits. Mercifully, they're not paying any attention to her. The imposing canvas of Dilys Derwent is empty; maybe she's visiting her portrait at Hogwarts. Something clicks. She looks at the calling card with McGonagall's note on the back: _Boudicca Derwent._ Yes, probably the same family. The wizarding world is too small for anyone to coincidentally share the same surname.

There really isn't a place to sit down, and she's already feeling restless. She checks her watch; an hour and a half yet to her appointment. She's contemplating going back out and wandering Muggle London for a bit, when the door opens and Neville enters, folding up his collapsible umbrella and brushing rain off his overcoat. He looks up and beams at her. "Hermione! What are you doing here?"

"I have an appointment," she said. "And you?"

"My first chance to see mum and dad since the war."

"I was just going to take a walk," she said. "I got here early."

"Let's get a cuppa first," Neville says, taking her arm.

The visitors' tea room is crowded. They find a tiny table in an alcove tucked around a corner. Neville leans in and speaks in a low confidential voice. "McGonagall got the Ministry to send some Aurors to keep an eye on the situation. It seemed to make a difference that it was a _prefect_ they tried to kill. So I finally have a day off."

"Good. I was worried you were going to have to carry that alone. Hero of the Battle of Hogwarts and all that." She pauses, tears unexpectedly welling up. She swallows them. "I'm glad McGonagall is coming through for us. It's nice to have some adult backup."

"She's feeling responsible for the Slytherin situation," he says. "You know, Pansy and Blaise. And Draco, too. She thinks evacuating the whole house during the battle sent the wrong message."

Neville gets up to bring them hot tea and she takes out the card to read McGonagall's note on the back. _Specialist in memory-related spell damage and Pensieve analysis._ She's bothered that it takes several readings for the meaning to register. Maybe she should ask Derwent to check her for spell damage. She's having these lapses in concentration lately. First things first, though. She pats her bag, where she's secreted the stack of tomes on memory charms, along with full notes on the magical and non-magical work that went into her parents' relocation to Australia.

When she first received the Owl from Derwent setting the appointment, she had set immediately to the task of writing it all out; she wanted to be sure that the Healer knew exactly what she did so that there can be no mistake. She was surprised at how long it took, and when she reread the notes she realized for the first time just how much she had done. Every bit of it completely unauthorized if not illegal: hacked into public records, created two completely imaginary people and worked out fictional identities for them, collaborated with her parents in writing an alternative history of the last twenty years, done a complex layered spell that most Aurors didn't know how to do. All well in advance of her NEWTs year. Oh yes, and without any official training in the Muggle world, either.

Or anyone to check the work to see that there wasn't some glaring error. This wasn't a Potions essay but her parents' fate.

Cleverest witch of her age, indeed.

She puts her head in her arms to hide her tears.

"Here, this should help," Neville says, and she feels the warmth of the cup next to her arm. She wipes her eyes as discreetly as she can and sits up. He hands her a handkerchief and she sniffles and dabs at her eyes. She sips at the tea. It helps, but only a little. The gloomy chill of the rain outside seems to have followed her in here.

"It's never easy coming here," he says. He hands her Boudicca Derwent's card. "Seems we're going to the same place."

"You know her?"

"She's the consultant in charge of my parents."

Small world, indeed. She remembers a rumor she heard years ago: that Neville's notorious forgetfulness was the fallout from a botched memory charm. The whispers said that the Aurors who arrived at the aftermath of his parents' torture had Obliviated him rather too zealously.

She isn't sure if she should tell Neville why she's seeing Healer Derwent.

She smiles weakly. "Here we are, all grown up," she says, not sure where the thought is going. "And it's the first time the grownups are helping at all. McGonagall gave me her name." She covers her eyes again, feeling unutterably weary. "Sorry," she says. "I'm just tired."

"Not sleeping well." It's not a question.

"No, not since… not for a while," she says. She uncovers her eyes, looks at him. Neville she can tell this. He's been through the same.

"Cruciatus," she said. "A couple of weeks before the battle. Easter holidays." She pauses. "It's not that it was that much. I know you've been through worse. Only half an hour, I think. Maybe not even that."

He says, "Any of that is too much," he says.

This is the first time she's told the story to someone she knows. "They brought us to Malfoy Manor, and … it was Bellatrix who did it to me."

He looks at her and it's as if his face has set into granite. Oh. She must be stupid because it's just sinking in now. Bellatrix. Who tortured Neville's parents.

He says, "And Draco was there."

"How did you know?"

"You said Easter holidays. And the way you looked at him in the hospital wing. If looks could kill…"

"Not a figure of speech," she said. "And you know that."

"I could _feel_ it. Wild magic. I never heard of a wandless killing curse, but that was it, or almost, wasn't it?" She nods, swallowing hard. Wrapping words around it makes it easier, just as it had when they talked in the hospital wing. For a moment it's an idea, rather than an actuality.

She can still feel the diffuse cloud of raw energy trying to shape itself into destruction. It revisits her in her dreams, and she's terribly afraid that it's real there too and she'll wake up having killed Crookshanks, who sleeps tucked next to her, or Ginny, or Luna.

She shakes her head. "That was appalling… what they did to him. And it was only children."

"Seven of them. Not good odds. And he wasn't paying attention. What possessed him to wear that prefect's badge, I don't know. Maybe it was already pinned to his robe and he forgot. He didn't even see them until they'd disarmed him." He pauses, shaking his head. "I think they took his wand away from him _by hand_ and threw it away_._ If it had been _Expelliarmus, _one of them would have been holding it."

She's still remembering the reluctance with which they had given way.

"And he underestimated them. They were all second- and third-year Hufflepuffs. You know, the so-called house for duffers, except they stick together. I wouldn't fancy facing a Hufflepuff mob. It moves as one beast."

She says, slowly, "_We_ were little beasts at that age. Or at least I was. I still remember smacking Malfoy in the mouth when he was taunting me about the hippogriff, and being _so pleased_ that it impressed Ron and Harry. He was just the last thing to annoy me that day. I don't even remember exactly what he said, but I do remember how good it felt when my knuckles hit his teeth." She added, "Ron and Harry thought it was pretty funny when he got turned into a ferret and bounced around the Great Hall. I can't imagine what that must have _felt_ like."

Neville frowns. "So the Carrows just spent a year training little beasts to plumb the depths. And Draco is the last Slytherin standing. Not that he's the worst, but he's the most memorable, and he has a talent for provocation." He looks at her. "The next time they may not back down."

She takes a deep breath. "It seemed they almost didn't back down this time."

He nods. "It's not good. Everything has changed, but they're still pretending it's a school." He looks at her. "I'm glad you're seeing Healer Derwent. She's the best. If you have any spell damage, she'll find it."

"It's not for me," she says. "It's for my parents."

Neville looks puzzled. "I heard your parents were out of country…"

She's boxed in now, and not sure how she got into this nor why she feels compelled to tell him the truth when she feels pretty sure he'll disapprove. "No, I'm here to see Derwent more as… a colleague." He looks at her, and she takes a deep breath. "I did a memory charm on my parents. To change who they were and remove me from their story. And I want to make sure it's undone properly…"

It's pure force of personality; otherwise how would Neville's round face and crooked snub nose and brown eyes turn into a mask of adamantine condemnation?

"They consented," she says. "I explained it and they said yes. I told them about the war, about Voldemort. I told them things I probably shouldn't have told them." His eyes don't move from her face, and his expression doesn't change. "I told them about your parents. They _chose._"

She's not going to cry, because she won't cry in front of Neville. "I couldn't leave them in plain sight for the Death Eaters to pick off. Look at what happened to the other Muggle-borns' parents! Harry's relatives were the only ones the Ministry actually put themselves out for." She says, "McGonagall already told me I overreached myself. And Derwent is going to give me all the horrid details."

He looks at her. He doesn't say a word.

She wasn't going to cry and she's blinking back tears anyway. It shocks her how much this hurts, as if everything is falling apart at once. She's wanted Ron since she was twelve, and now that she has him, they're arguing all the time. Now Neville thinks she's wrong, too, irreducibly wrong, not in a matter of fact but of soul, and he will never respect her again. She didn't realize that Neville's respect meant anything until she had lost it.

She reaches for her teacup blindly and stumbles away from the table to return it. She knows that the people in the tea room are staring at her; they can't help but be staring and it's too crowded for her to pass unseen. She pushes through the door into the mercifully empty hallway, where she leans against the wall and wipes her eyes with the back of one hand. She takes a deep breath to calm herself. Of course he'd think she was arrogant. McGonagall said the spell was beyond the scope of most field Aurors. _And what had Neville's parents been? And how many years did they train for that? And they're lying downstairs in the locked ward with wrecked memories, so how else is Neville supposed to look at me? _

If she breathes deeply and evenly, she reminds herself as the tears run down her face, at least she won't sound as if she's crying. She's concentrating on this so hard that she doesn't hear the door open, nor does she hear what Neville says as he puts his arm around her. Then it's both his arms around her and he's stroking her hair, not awkwardly as Ron does when she's upset, but with authority, as if he had comforted generations of heartbroken children. That embrace feels so much like safe harbor that she starts sobbing, and doesn't worry that her tears are soaking into the fuzzy warmth of Neville's shirt.

Afterward, she goes to the loo and washes her face with cold water. Then she follows Neville downstairs to the closed ward to visit his parents for the first time since the Battle of Hogwarts.

***

**Author's notes: **

"S.C.A.M." I owe to Zahra's "Anatomy of a Dysfunctional Relationship." See http://www (dot) obsessedmuch (dot) net/dysfunctional/anatomydis (dot) html. Summary: Harry hates Draco. Nonetheless...

Boudicca Derwent began from J.K. Rowling's suggestive description of the "motherly-looking Healer" on the closed ward (see "Christmas on the Closed Ward," (Order of the Phoenix chapter 23), but turned into someone else entirely.

Neville's animus against the Weasley twins: pretty plausible from canon, but it was A. J. Hall and RedHen who wrote about it at length, in the context of the larger problem of bullying at Hogwarts. As mentioned above, my debts to these two writers cannot be acknowledged sufficiently. General references: A. (fiction and some commentary): http://www (dot) lopiverse (dot) shoesforindustry (dot) net/ ; RedHen (commentary): http://www (dot) redhen-publications (dot) com/Potterverse (dot) html

(All web links accessed 12/3/2009)


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

Boudicca Derwent has a round face and steel-grey hair shot with silver. She greets Hermione with a firm handshake. Her office reminds Hermione a little of the Headmaster's office, back in Dumbledore's day. There are strange little instruments whirring and humming to themselves up on high shelves and two or three of the shallow stone basins that Hermione knows now are Pensieves.

Derwent begins, "Minerva tells me that you want to talk to me about the memory charm you put on your parents."

Hermione nods and takes the notes and the book out of her bag. "I've brought everything," she says. She opens the book and points out the page, and says, "I wrote down everything I did, at least what I can remember." She takes a deep breath, and lets it out. She has the inexplicable urge to burst into tears. It didn't help seeing Neville's parents just now, but it didn't feel right to decline when Neville had been so kind to her in the tea room. Now she's haunted by the weight of _consequences._ The post-war is going to be very long indeed for Neville.

Derwent pores over the book, leafs through the notes. "Very thorough, Miss Granger," she says. "You know this is a very complex spell. Not often attempted, even by specialists." There's a pause.

"Do you know why that's so?"

"Because it's complicated," Hermione says, and feels foolish. "I suppose… there's a lot that could go wrong." She feels tears coming on and swallows them. "I don't know enough to undo it. I think there are things missing from the book about that. But I had to do it myself. There wasn't any expert for me to ask. And I wanted them to be safe."

"Do you know what could have gone wrong?"

Hermione shakes her head. "I had to think about getting it _right_."

"I saw you coming out of the closed ward with Mr. Longbottom," Derwent says. "I assume you're a friend of the family."

Hermione nods. "Neville and I were at school together."

"You might have found yourself in his situation." She pauses a moment to let this sink in. "Your notes are very thorough, but I would like to collect the relevant memories for review in the Pensieve. In particular, all conversations you had with your parents about this procedure, and the day you actually did it."

Those memories are fresh in mind so it doesn't take long for Derwent's wand to extract the silvery strands and place them in the basin on the desk.

Derwent says, "I should let you know that you'll likely be back here again. The Ministry is taking Pensieve depositions for key incidents in the late war."

Hermione's heart begins to race. She says, "I wanted to ask about that. I'm having some … some problems since then. Is it hard to check for spell damage?"

"What sorts of problems?"

"Nightmares. Every night the same ones. Things … bad things that happened to me in the war. Sometimes when I'm awake, too. I see people who remind me … or I think I see them. I see the dead, well, particular people. People who … hurt me." Derwent nods, listening.

"I want to cry for no reason, out of nowhere. Or I'm angry. Angry suddenly. Very angry. Angry enough to kill. That scares me. The war's supposed to be over. And I don't sleep well. And my concentration is terrible."

Derwent steps from behind her desk and motions Hermione to the middle of the room. She points her wand at Hermione as she walks around her seven times, moving it in a slow rising spiral from ankles to crown, then turns and repeats in the other direction.

"Nothing," she said. "No magical damage, I mean. Are you having any difficulties with casting ordinary spells?"

"No, not with ordinary ones… well, when I said 'angry enough to kill,' there was one incident, I mean, I could feel a curse … _the _curse, you know the one I mean, I don't know how to say this … it seemed it was trying to cast itself."

Derwent leans closer. "And did it?"

"No. I started breathing very slowly and reminding myself of where I was and that I wasn't in danger. Neville was there, and that helped."

"You will need to do that regularly. Pay attention to your breath. Do not let thought become intention. I will not tell you that this is easy, because it is not clear to me that the war is actually over. For those of us who lived through it most directly, it may never be over."

"So that's all? Pay attention?"

"Constant vigilance. Know the difference between your own thoughts and what is actually happening."

"I'm writing things down," she says. "When they're down on paper, I can see that some of them are crazy thoughts."

Derwent nods. "Careful documentation is the heart of Healing. Your instincts are good." She pauses. "On that note, I have a request for you on another case. A war casualty, like yourself."

Hermione nods. "If I can help."

"There is a patient I have been seeing… for some years now. A young person with disfiguring damage from a cursed artifact. She is distraught, as you are, and speaks of killing herself—speaks so with increasing frequency. I am concerned that her mother may not be able to restrain her from suicide, if the curse cannot be broken."

"I don't understand."

"I have reason to believe you may know something about the artifact." Hermione shakes her head in puzzlement. "From the nature of the damage, it appears to have been a cursed contract. Abrogate the contract, and the victim is marked."

"What sort of mark?"

"A word spelled out across her face. Most unmistakably, in blue-black pustules. The word 'sneak.' Does this sound familiar, Miss Granger?"

Hermione's stomach goes cold. "Maria Edgecombe. She signed up for the Defense Association and then denounced us to Umbridge. We were threatened with torture."

"So there was a members list?" Hermione nods. "And it was cursed."

"Jinxed," Hermione corrects.

"In this case, a matter of semantics. Do you have this list?"

Her wartime instincts kick in immediately: _Give nothing to the enemy, least of all lists of names. No one is to be trusted._ Derwent goes on, "I think we know who belonged—belongs—to the Defense Association. Also known as Dumbledore's Army. If I am not mistaken, nearly everyone on that list received decorations or commendations from the Ministry."

Derwent takes out a copy of the _Daily Prophet,_ the one with the photo of Harry and Hermione and Ron and Neville wearing the Order of Merlin and waving. "The full list of those decorated, page three." She turns the page and pushes the paper across the desk to Hermione, who reviews the list, looks up, and nods.

"If I had the original parchment, a curse breaker would have a chance. You may not be aware, but this curse appears to be a variant of the cursed contract in standard use at Gringott's, with a few of the fail-safes removed--no doubt for simplicity under the circumstances, yes?"

Hermione nods, feeling sick. She remembers how clever she thought it was to take those bits out.

"Were Miss Edgecombe to kill herself, I would reckon her a casualty of war. And responsibility for that casualty would lie at your feet."

Hermione digs into her bag, to the bottom where the _most secret_ things live. She takes out a ragged handkerchief, lays it on the desk, and waves her wand over it to transfigure it back into a parchment.

"Take it." Derwent does so. A horrible thought occurs to her. "So… am I a war criminal? Will they prosecute me? If you're right, I suppose I deserve it."

"You freely chose this, and it did harm. If the harm can be reversed, then you have made some amends. Under the current political climate it is highly unlikely that you will be prosecuted. And I am treating this as a confidential matter, out of respect to my patient's privacy and her family's feelings."

Hermione says in a dead voice, "We were at war. Alone. Before anyone else was admitting there even _was_ a war. I did what I had to do."

"Secret wars are the ugliest ones." Derwent pauses. "To return to the matter of your parents. As you correctly intuited, this is a specialist matter--unfortunately, not simply a matter for Healers, but a political matter as well. We will have to work with the Australian Ministry for Magic, and the diplomatic situation at present is … complex, to say the very least. Particularly as regards Muggle Liaison."

"Do you mean you won't be able to do it?"

"No, only that it will take longer than either of us expect. I have given Minerva my word of honor, and I will give it you as well, that we _will_ bring your parents back, with their memories restored so far as we can."

"So far as you can?"

"As I said, the spell is complex. It appears that you laid the groundwork correctly—I will know for certain once I've reviewed the Pensieve—but full reversal is not guaranteed. That's a part of the complexity."

"But the book didn't say—"

"There's much that specialist Healers learn in practice. Often those details are passed over in the literature."

Fury flares in her chest. She's on her feet, shouting: "I _hate _this! You people are _shit_ for documentation! And it's not just me and my parents. I have three schoolmates _dead_ because somebody couldn't be arsed to write down how to undo something! Cut to pieces right in the middle of Hogsmeade, and I don't know if they were guilty because they didn't get anything like a fair trial."

"Friends of yours?"

"Absolutely not! Couldn't stand any of them. But that rotten spell is all _over_ the place! All you have to do is _gossip_ about that curse and everybody knows how to do it!"

Derwent leans forward, her eyes alight with professional interest. "Sectumsempra. Pomfrey said she did aftercare for a student who survived it the year before last…but she didn't do the reversal."

"You could get the memory from the patient and Pensieve it. If he was conscious at the time, then you'll get _some_ information about the reversal. It was a Dark spell, they say. And Pensieve the caster, too—that should cover the gaps."

"I'm assuming both parties are alive. Do you know where to find them?"

"Yes. Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Harry's living with Arthur Weasley's family at the Burrow in Ottery St. Catchpole, and Draco is at Hogwarts."

Derwent is already writing out the parchment for her owl. Hermione assumes she's dismissed and stands up to go, but Derwent gestures for her to sit down.

Once the owl is winging its way to Hogwarts, Derwent looks up and smiles at Hermione, but with narrowed and appraising eyes.

"Miss Granger, I have a few more questions for you." She summons an elegant tea service and a plate of chocolate biscuits. "Would you like some tea while we chat?"

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – fourth week of May)**

I think the hardest thing was watching Neville with his parents. He talked to them as if they understood. He sat by his mother's bedside and told her the story of the Battle of Hogwarts and what he had been doing that year, all very calm and matter of fact, and asked her how she had been. She seems to respond more than his father does. He introduced me again; after all, even if they were sane, that would be reasonable given that I was only here in passing in the Christmas of fifth year, when Ron's dad was hospitalized here. But this time he wasn't embarrassed at all, just calm and gracious and matter-of-fact, as if we were all at home.

It's interesting the way he tells the story. As if it happened a long, long time ago and it's nothing to worry about, and he's only getting them caught up on news of the neighborhood. His voice is very soothing and they respond to that. I could see it on his mother's face. She turned to him like a flower toward the sun, and took a whole collection of gum wrappers out of the pocket of her dressing gown. She's been saving them, I suppose. He received them as if they were a birthday present, and very carefully put them in his pocket.

I didn't know what to say, so I sat quietly with my hands folded like a good girl, just as I did when mum and dad took me on visits to elderly relatives. Neville didn't seem to mind. He included me in the conversation, if you can call it conversation when two of the people in the room don't remember who they are and can't talk. He asked me questions and I answered them. He told his parents about what he was doing in the greenhouses and how the war orphans were doing, and Gran's visit to Hogsmeade. She was over at the Ministry and would be coming later, he said to them.

How long will he be visiting them? How often? How long will they live? Witches and wizards can live into their mid-hundreds. Neville's parents were only in their thirties in the first war. They must be in their early fifties now, thought they look far older, with their white hair and wasted faces. Imagine sixty or seventy more years of this. Neville will be bringing his children and his grandchildren and maybe his great-grandchildren to this room.

I think this is the first time I've really thought about "the post-war," as Ron calls it. Time stretches out in front of us and the List of Things to Do seems to be losing its meaning. Neville got a medal for killing the snake, which seems to have been a very small item on his List of Things to Do. But that's starting to look like the least of his courage.

***

**Author's notes:** Arsinoe de Blessenville. _The Golden Age_ provides a handy list of Hermione's rumored and actual ethical lapses during the war; that story also highlights some of the 'truth and reconciliation' issues post-war, and the approach of at least some factions to settling them peaceably.


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated - first week of June 1998)**

The dream again last night. Again. So tired today, and I didn't want to accept the dinner invitation from Bill and Fleur at Shell Cottage but Bill _insisted._ It was just me and Harry and Ron. Bill was quite pointed about that. We dined early and Fleur brought out some excellent wine—a gift from her parents on their recent visit—and then Bill suggested a hike along the cliffs to clear our heads a little …

Before he sat down with us in the study and laid out the charges from Gringotts.

I have never seen numbers that big in my life. Especially not next to my name. Actually, it's my name, Ron's, and Harry's. Not the Saviors of the Wizarding World, but the Great Gringotts Bank Robbers.

Charlie retrieved the dragon for them free of charge, as a personal favor to his parents. Otherwise Gringotts would have seized the Burrow. I'm not sure how they'd do that, but apparently they can. And they can still seize it if Ron doesn't pay his share.

They have already seized all the money my parents transferred to Gringotts for what was to be my seventh year at Hogwarts. So I'm destitute, but not yet out of debt. Ron and Harry reassured me that I had a place to stay no matter what.

The only good news is that they can't take my parents' house, because they can't seize property owned by Muggles. That's apparently some kind of side-agreement to the Statute of Secrecy.

I'll just list the rest since it's engraved on the inside of my eyelids.

* One watch dragon (duly captured and returned by Charlie Weasley)

* Expenses related to dragon recovery (Obliviators etc.)

* Reconstruction of the lower, middle, and upper passages of Gringotts underground

* Cleanup expenses related to Lestrange vault (that would be the duplicate cups, armor etc.)

* Removal expenses: one corpse (human)

* Miscellaneous spell damage

They couldn't identify the corpse further than the Dark Mark on the forearm (which, interesting note, goes down to the bone). Harry turned an unpleasant shade of greenish-white and mumbled something about Travers. Oh yes. The Death Eater he put under Imperius and told to hide. Guess he hid. That nice dinner was not sitting too well on me either and I was regretting the last glass of wine.

Then it got ugly. Bill said that Griphook was really pushing this one and it was making things hot for him at work, because Ron's name had gotten mentioned repeatedly. I shouldn't have had the wine, because I said the dread words _I told you so_ about trying to cheat Griphook out of the sword. Ron called me a sanctimonious nagging shrew and a couple of other things.

Harry said it wasn't fair because it was war damage, after all, and couldn't they just take it out of the Malfoys, since Lucius was the successor to Voldemort World Conquest Ltd.?

Bill said that would be an idea if the Ministry and Gringotts weren't already locked in a dispute over the Malfoy assets. He also reminded Harry that as legatee of both the Potter and Black estates, he had long been one of the four wealthiest wizards in Britain. (The exact ranking depends on how you count wealth: gold, real estate, magical artifacts, etc., and the count depends on whether or not you include Justin Finch-Fletchley, whose wealth is wholly in the Muggle world.) Now that the Malfoys are out of the game, Harry is in the top two or three, depending on who you ask.

And he said, "You're popular with the Ministry at the moment, but they are not going to bail you out. Poor little rich boy only goes so far."

On the other hand, the total charges come to a substantial proportion of the Potter-Black assets.

Ron said, "_I_ don't have any money. What are they going to do, take my first born child?"

Bill told him that that particular form of payment hadn't been used in a couple of centuries but Griphook was on a tear so, quote, "if the two of you are having it off I hope you're being careful." With specific recommendations on contraceptive charms and potions. I like Bill. He's thorough.

Harry said he would cover Ron's expenses. Then he paused, and the pause turned into a silence. And some of yours, he said.

That's when I really started to feel sick. That coppery taste of betrayal. My mouth went dry and I couldn't think what to say. I had paid my own way—no, my parents had paid my way—and now I was going to have to figure it out myself.

I ignored the two of them and turned to Bill. "So what are my options?" I said. "Short of the first-born child."

Bill told me that I could get a job to pay it off. He assured me that my talents were well-regarded and with reason; he'd had to work overtime breaking the curse on the Defense Association membership list. Impressively nasty, he said. His contract work for St. Mungo's generally isn't that involved.

"So, indentured servitude?" I said. Not that I have a choice if I have to slave in the mines for Gringotts or be a Ministry scrivener. War hero or no, I would not be starting at the top without my NEWTS.

"Let's talk," he said. "I think Shacklebolt might be able to line you up something with the war crimes commission. Something using your very particular talents. Healer Derwent was _very_ impressed with you."

***

**(three days later)**

I've been _spoken to_ by the best. Reprimanded, yelled at, reproached with my overweening pride. Usually I just smile to myself and think, _duly noted._ I've overstepped myself? Yes, what's new? I've overstepped _your_ notion of what I ought to be doing, but _you _have low expectations for me, and depending on which _you_ it is, _you _might well wish me raped and dead at the bottom of a ditch.

I remember waving my hand madly in Potions class and Snape ignoring me every time. And then when I'd give him the definition he'd ream me for reciting out of the book. "Swotty little know-it-all." He said that with such relish. The same definition from one of his little favorites, and it would have been ten points to Slytherin and how nicely recalled, Mr. Malfoy.

On the other hand, every time he said something rude to me it was an invisible _ten points to Hermione Granger, because the bastard knows you're here and he may not like it but he has to live with it._ The only time I felt blind rage in that class was when he'd bully Neville. Which now looks like sheer irrational stupidity on Snape's part, because it made Neville nervous and even more clumsy and it was taking all of our lives in his hands to make someone _clumsier _in a room where a wrong move could make things _explode._

All in all, not that I would _ever_ have said this aloud, but it was fuck _you, _Professor Snape. Sir. With my most respectful regards.

McGonagall, on the other hand, never treated students from her own House any differently from the others, which was infuriating when we'd watch Snape blatantly favor the Slytherins. On the other hand, I can feel deep satisfaction that Malfoy and his cronies got the same astringent dressing-down from her that we got, when they were unlucky enough to be caught.

McGonagall's style of reprimand, like her style in general, is dry. She looked at the texts I'd brought on memory charms and she told me that the memory charm I did on my parents was beyond the scope of most field Aurors and she would not presume to advise me on reversing it. She wrote out the referral to Boudicca Derwent at St. Mungo's and sent off an owl and that was it. Marching orders. The inessential withers in the mountain passes of her austere regard. You can't sweeten her with flattery or soften her with threats. Spend long enough in that bracing atmosphere and you'll mummify like an Incan child sacrifice or a Stone Age traveler gone astray in the Alps.

I scuttled out of there like a first-year.

I didn't know that this was just the warm-up act for being disapproved of by Neville Longbottom. Neville fools you, because he's warm and sweet and apologetic, but when you hit one of his points of principle, it's solid granite. Messing with memory, tampering with it in any way, is a sore point with him. Of course.

He was startled because he'd never seen me cry, and he put his arms around me and patted my hair and soothingly told me I was the smartest person he knew and if there was anyone he'd trust to do something like that it would be me, but he didn't trust anybody to do that. And he was sorry he'd made me cry.

He didn't make me cry. My conscience made me cry. Fetching up against the solid stone wall of Neville's life-long understanding of _consequences_ made me feel them too. This is _real._ I could have done real damage, and it turns out now that I won't know for at least a year. It could be unfolding right now on the other side of the world and there's not a thing I can do because the Australian Ministry for Magic won't let anyone from Britain in until they're satisfied that we've sorted out our pureblood supremacy mania.

So when I went in to talk to Boudicca Derwent, I was primed to be dressed down, and already convinced that I deserved it.

If McGonagall is deep winter in the Scottish mountains, then Derwent is a cool glowing English summer, with tea laid out on the green turf at four o'clock and mellow light on the cathedral. She did in fact put out tea and biscuits, which were more than welcome since I'd done little but sip at the tea I took with Neville. I took out the books again, and gave her my extensive notes what I'd done. She reviewed them and asked my permission to take memories for the Pensieve.

And then we had a lovely chat. She asked me all sorts of questions, one professional to another, and I positively blossomed. I told her everything. She asked me friendly curious questions about public records databases and the National Health Service and just how you create an identity for someone in the Muggle world, and what exactly _dentists_ are and how they do what they do out there in the wilderness where there is no magic. As the light mellowed into late afternoon I was drawing diagrams on bits of parchment to explain to her the sheer elegance of relational database design. It was _lovely._

So when she asked for my help with treating a casualty of war, I gave her my full assent and then it turns out it was Maria Edgecombe. And she got the cursed parchment—cursed not jinxed, she emphasized—out of my hands without any effort at all. And impressed on me that I'd nearly killed Maria, by proxy anyway.

She got out of me everything I know about Sectumsempra, and I realized as I walked out of there that she even knew who had cast that curse on whom, even though I'd just told her Harry-and-Draco without specifying. The fact I didn't specify gave it away.

The woman is a master interrogator, and I didn't fully appreciate that until Shacklebolt approached me for that job with the War Crimes Commission. What they want is the magical analogue of a searchable database. I'm to have access to the best names in Arithmancy and Charms; my professors at Hogwarts will be at my beck and call as consultants. I know perfectly well that Kingsley Shacklebolt knows _nothing_ about computers, and he didn't ask for a database by name either, but he had a list of what it had to be able to do. That list could have been supplied by no one but Boudicca Derwent. She worked forward from what I told her to what such a thing would be able to do.

I wish I had met this woman years ago. She makes me think it's worth staying here.

***

**(Later that evening)**

Ron snapped at me the last time I mentioned my parents. He reminded me that the war is over and there's things he'd rather think about than the Australian Ministry for Magic. He reminded me that I never spent all that much time with them, so why was I obsessive on the topic now that I'd misplaced them?

I kissed him to take the bitterness out of his voice, and he kissed me back—with feeling, I should add, and then pulled me close and put my hands on him, and growled, "make yourself useful," which I am finding less and less erotic all the time.

I kissed Ron in the heat of battle. It was a fierce and searing kiss and it was sloppy and formless and I didn't care, and we would likely have gone further if Harry hadn't cleared his throat with evident embarrassment and reminded us that we were, in fact, in the midst of a battle and perhaps we might defer our mutual discovery to a more convenient time.

It's always been fierce with Ron, whether it's argument or passion. I was willing to put up with the arguments, even with the jibes and insults, because at least he was paying attention. When he'd say slighting things about girls in general or about me, it hurt more than far harsher things from anyone else. Even being called "Mudblood" by Draco (I mean once I knew what the insult meant) didn't hurt as much as Ron saying I was too fixated on rules and schoolwork. After all, Ron was important, but Draco was, well, just _Draco._ I didn't expect much of a stupid little boy who repeated his father's bigoted opinions as if they were gospel. But I had great hopes of Ron. I've wanted him since I was twelve years old. There hasn't been a time when his tall frame and flaming red hair didn't strike fire from me; my heart always leapt a beat when I saw him.

Now I'm not sure. I even caught myself wondering what it would be like to be kissed by Neville, if he put into it even half the tenderness I felt in that comforting embrace. When I close my eyes, I can still feel the weight of his hand stroking my hair; I can feel the warmth of it on my neck, _through_ my hair. And Neville is _nothing_ like Ron.

Ron was amused by the idea of the odious Malfoy finally getting a dose of his own medicine and even joked about wanting to torture him personally. The feud between the Weasleys and the Malfoys had already gone too far as of our second year; I'll never forgive Lucius for giving that cursed diary to Ginny—yes, the daughter of his enemy, but _only eleven years old._ Ron really didn't want to rescue Malfoy and Goyle from the fire in the Room of Requirement, and I wonder what he would have done if Harry hadn't insisted. Leaving a seventeen-year-old boy and his unconscious friend to burn to death in a fire not of his own making seems just as monstrous as turning over an eleven-year-old girl to the tender mercies of the Dark Lord. No matter what a nasty piece of work that boy might have been, he didn't deserve to die like that.

Neville never considered for a moment leaving Draco to his fate, even though Draco was the first to bully him at Hogwarts and took it as far as insulting his disabled parents.

And then there's Lavender Brown, but then we won't talk about her. Because if I'm going to be entirely just, I have to say that on my side earlier there was Viktor, even though I was far more discreet than Ron was with Lavender. Viktor and I made fair and friendly use of each other. That wasn't just about the private pleasure of snogging (though that was certainly nice). It was Viktor's public and eloquent gesture to the Quidditch groupies, the fawning Slytherins, and his own headmaster, who might have resigned from the Death Eaters but definitely hadn't resigned from the Pureblood snobs. It was my public gesture to Ron, and as a second thought, to everybody else who'd thought I was a useful but annoying source of help with homework, and never anything more than that.

I'm not sure that Ron's use of Lavender was fair _or_ friendly.

Ron laughed at me about wanting to liberate the house elves, and he didn't see a reason why a wizard shouldn't cheat a goblin, given the chance. That makes me wonder just when it might have occurred to him that promises made to me didn't weigh quite the same as promises to a Pureblood. Because once you allow there's someone you can cheat or bully with impunity, it's much too tempting to add others to that category.

He called me a sanctimonious nagging shrew when I said simply that he shouldn't have tried to cheat Griphook.

I couldn't bring myself to ask Harry to pay my debt in preference to Ron, but Ron said _nothing_ in the course of that conversation. He left me to my fate.

I'm annoying but useful, and I've outlived my usefulness. And now he's annoyed that I don't want to settle down and make babies. Which I suppose would be another form of usefulness, and eventually he might find that annoying as well.

I've wanted him since I was twelve years old. He's been my one true love.

To him, I've been… annoying but useful.

***

**Author's notes:** The idea of the war debt to Gringotts comes from _The Golden Age_ by Arsinoe de Blessenville, although her resolution of the issue is quite different. Both she and I assume that at the close of this most acrimonious race war, the Ministry is quite leery of further offending the Goblins. Harry's standing among the wealthy of wizarding Britain is courtesy of JOdel aka RedHen.


	6. Chapter 6

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

In the early morning of Friday the fifth of June, Hermione is still wrestling with the problem of the potion that Bill recommended. She has most of the ingredients assembled, but there's one last extract, from a plant which needs to be gathered by moonlight, and the full moon is rapidly approaching. Yesterday, she naively asked Molly if she could have some from the garden out back, and Molly looked at her with narrowed eyes and asked her why she's wanting that particular item.

There are only a few applications for that plant, and in telling her the harvest timeline, she's unwittingly told Molly which one.

Molly says that if she were a good girl she wouldn't be needing any such thing.

It's not a question of being a _good girl,_ it's a question of being safe. Bill wasn't joking, even if his tone was humorous. She doesn't dare risk pregnancy any time before she's released from her obligation to Gringotts. Bill took her aside after the conference and made it very clear that he was definitely in earnest, and that she should take every precaution she could because it didn't appear that Ron took the situation seriously.

And Molly keeps an eye on that garden so she doesn't think she'll be able to get what she needs on the sly, and anyway it would be neither honorable nor politic to resort to what Molly would read as pilfering. That leaves the Hogwarts greenhouses, and Neville. That's even more embarrassing, because she really doesn't want to say anything about her sex life (actual or potential) to Neville, but under the circumstances, embarrassment is a luxury she can ill afford.

When Molly is out supervising Ron and Harry in the de-gnoming of the garden, she nips into the kitchen and Floos Neville at Hogwarts. Luckily for her, he's in—just waking up, in fact—and she makes her request. He says to bring the instructions over so that he can be sure to harvest and prepare it correctly. She has no doubt he knows just as well as Molly what the purpose is, but his manner is mercifully neutral.

Now that she is destitute in the wizarding world, she's rapidly coming to appreciate every favor granted without an attempt to humiliate her. She's been calculating madly how to find work on the other side of the border, because she will need funds in that world and her parents' assets all belong to the Wilkinses now. There's some little money set aside in her name, but not enough to matter. She hadn't thought about this eventuality when she set up the whole elaborate scheme. And she can't bring Muggle money into Gringotts for exchange, because it will be immediately seized and applied to her debt. That wouldn't be such a problem, except that the apothecaries take payment only in wizarding currency.

She never was wealthy in either world, but neither was she poor. Now she's understanding all too well Ron's defensiveness about his hand-me-down clothes and homemade Weasley jumpers and out-of-fashion dress robes. She knows that her appearance hasn't changed, but her bearing probably has; nonetheless, she's trying not to let her apprehension or her fear show. Thank Merlin she never did go for the full traditional look, so she can get by with her school robes over her ordinary clothes for the most part, and her pretense of ongoing student status means that her clothes needn't look up to the minute.

She pulls on her robes over T-shirt and jeans, and takes her cloak as well and walks down the garden path. She doesn't want to look as if she's sneaking out, but she definitely doesn't want to cross paths with Molly again this morning. So when she hears Molly's voice on the other side of the hedge, she stops and sidles into the shadows.

It's Molly and Andromeda, out in the garden. And she just heard her name.

Andromeda is saying, "Hermione is a sensible girl."

Molly says, "But a good girl doesn't _need _that sort of thing."

Andromeda replies that her daughter was a good girl by all accounts, but reckless. And at this late date, she rates sensible over 'good,' whatever 'good' may mean when it comes to having children in wartime.

There's an indignant sniff from Molly, and then she reminds Andromeda that Ron was born at the height of hostilities in the _last_ war, and in any case, _this_ war is over and it's time the young people settled down.

Andromeda says, "I don't think Hermione is ready to settle down, and I wouldn't be either, if I were her. You and I are homebodies, Molly, but I don't think she is, any more than Nymphadora was." There's a pause that Hermione is pretty sure corresponds to a slow shake of the head, and then Andromeda adds, "I still don't understand it. Why she married so fast, and then had a child right away… it wasn't like her. If it were ordinary times, I'd suspect someone dosed her with a love potion. She wasn't herself the last two years… but it wasn't ordinary times, not at all." Her voice is dreamy and sad. Hermione wonders if she's thinking about Ted. Andromeda lost everyone within a few months: husband, daughter, son-in-law.

There's an answering silence from Molly, who's likely counting her blessings as she stands in the green and sunny glory of her wildly burgeoning garden. Then she hears the back door creak open, and footsteps going up the back steps. Hermione slips along the hedge and out to the lane, where she focuses her intention on the gates of Hogwarts, turns in a circle, wand out, and Apparates, hoping that no one at the Burrow heard the crack.

***

As before, the Aurors on duty at the gates give her a quick once-over and let her through. She walks across the grounds to the greenhouses, brooding on what she just heard. It never occurred to her that Tonks might not have been in her right mind when she pursued Remus. They'd studied Amortentia in Potions class and Professor Slughorn had warned them that this potion wasn't to be trifled with, that what it produced was not love but obsession. He warned them, very prudently she now thinks, against reliance on potions for love or luck, though she's still grateful to that dose of Felix Felicis that Harry gave them all the night that the Death Eaters got into Hogwarts. (Ron's voice corrects her: "the night that _Draco-bloody-Malfoy _let the Death Eaters into Hogwarts. And what were you about, saving that bastard from what he deserved?") Hard to tell if it were the good-luck potion that got them alive through that night, _there being no control group,_ she thinks wryly. And wizards don't do statistics.

Who might have had an interest in dosing Tonks…? Well, one suspect stands out: Molly the inveterate matchmaker. Molly of the tea and sympathy, Molly the brooding hen. Molly who wants to see everyone happily and fruitfully married off, who now wants to see Hermione married off to Ron at earliest opportunity. Cynically she thinks: Ron would be one less child on Molly's laundry and meals detail; it can't be easy running that household on Arthur's salary. And she feels guilty because she isn't able to make any financial contribution; every knut she makes at any sort of employment in the wizarding world is applied immediately to her debt.

She's still angry at Ron for refusing to discuss the contraceptive potion or any of the other options that Bill reviewed. Fleur sat down with her alone afterward and got even more specific, telling her quite frankly which of those options she herself used and under what circumstances. The most effective potion is taken monthly and tastes quite dreadful, but it's good for a whole month. There are charms but they have to be applied each time, and she does mean _each time,_ "so if it's a long night you have to keep your head about you, _cherie_. No _amour fou_ or you could find yourself expecting a little one." She's grateful to Bill and Fleur for their forthrightness, and to Fleur for her graciousness in spite of the outright hostility she met from the Weasley women.

She is _very_ grateful to Fleur, who nursed her and Mr. Ollivander and Dean and Luna through the after-effects of their captivity. Hermione remembers her own giddy gratitude for being alive, and her sense of having gotten off easily—how could she feel otherwise when the others had been in that dungeon for far longer: Luna for months, and Ollivander for over a year. She wonders now what kind of dreams they have.

And now she's arrived at the greenhouses. Her stomach clenches, and she checks her pocket for the instructions she wrote out. Neville offered both to harvest and to prepare the extract, and all she'd asked was for a bit of the plant itself. And no doubt he knows why she wants it.

Around the corner she spots him; he's standing in a flood of green-filtered sunlight with his back to her, his hair lit to fiery bronze where the sun strikes it. He's supervising at one of the potting benches, where three or four younger students sit carefully re-potting specimens. One of them is a little girl with pigtails, whose hair is almost Weasley-red in the sunlight. She wonders if that's the ringleader of the killer Hufflepuffs who set on Draco Malfoy. Killer Hufflepuffs, what a thought, she reflects, and then remembers Neville's words: _I wouldn't fancy facing a Hufflepuff mob. It moves as one beast._

"Hello?" she says.

Neville turns and smiles when he recognizes her. She's startled by the warmth of the smile, the way it lights up his perfectly ordinary face, round except for the rugged note of his broken nose. _Someone did a rotten job setting the bone,_ she thought, _if they ever set it at all. _ Yes, that was three years ago, the battle of the Department of Mysteries, and somehow in the confusion Neville's broken nose had been overlooked. Or was it this last year, which makes more sense? She realizes she doesn't have a clear picture of what he looked like the year before last. She thinks ruefully, that Neville's been overlooked in general and realizes that she's having the insight now because she's seeing him for the first time, now that it's him helping her rather than the other way around.

"You brought the instructions?" he asks.

She gives him the parchment. "Neville, I really appreciate this," she says.

"It's the least I can do," he says. "You helped me in Potions every chance you got, and you never cared how much trouble it made for you with Snape." He smiles again. "I'm not such a duffer now that no one's shouting at me."

He reviews the parchment. "Gathered at the full moon… simmered for one hour following moonset… oh, this isn't difficult." He looks at her. "Though I understand the timing is critical. If you weren't averse to staying overnight at Hogwarts, you could supervise." She nods. "Once you have the extract, it will keep for up to a year. We'll set you up with enough for twelve doses."

She's feeling dizzy suddenly, and she remembers that she didn't have breakfast. She sits down rather abruptly on one of the stools.

Neville asks her if she's feeling all right.

"More or less," she said. "I was up early and forgot breakfast." Perversely, tears spring to her eyes. She's annoyed with herself; she _knows_ she was never this weepy before, even on an empty stomach.

And then she looks at Neville, who has turned to watch his small charges, and she sees an expression on his face that can only be described as wistful. He saw her tears, and he knows what potion he's helping her to make, and he's very deliberately respecting both her privacy and her pride.

"I'll get you something from the kitchens as soon as we're done here," he says.

***

The students have gone back to the dormitories, and Neville vanishes to bring her food. When he returns, it's with an extravagant feast. Apparently, her name is a byword with the Hogwarts house elves, in spite of their refusal of her many knitted hats.

She eats as much as she can, and gestures to Neville to help her. "I couldn't possibly eat all this. Was this your idea or theirs?"

"Some of both," he says. "You're looking tired, and you're thinner than you were." He frowns. "I thought you were staying at the Burrow."

"I am," she says. What she doesn't tell him is that she's been skipping supper some nights, because it's too hard to face Molly or Ron, both of whom have been surly with her since the meeting with Bill. Molly takes it personally that she doesn't want to have children right away—meaning any time before the post-war situation resolves—and she wonders if an "accidental" pregnancy had featured in Ron's marriage plans. Why he's so keen on getting married when things haven't settled down yet, she doesn't know.

"You have the habit of worrying," she adds, to deflect any further inquiries.

He nods. Worrying is his occupation now, he tells her. He's looking after the children and worrying about what's going to happen to them in a world that has no provisions for their well-being. He's helping Professor Sprout to rebuild the greenhouses and to keep them running. He's helping with the physical repairs to Hogwarts, which are nearing completion. The real damage is social, and much of it is invisible: the children who won't return because their Muggle parents have withdrawn them from the wizarding world entirely, the children who remain at Hogwarts as orphans, the questions about the House system now that Slytherin House has been decimated by bloody reprisals.

He tells her about Blaise Zabini's mother, who showed up a few days ago to talk to Headmistress McGonagall and remained closeted with her for three hours. When they emerged, both women looked exhausted and distraught. Neville says he saw traces of tears on McGonagall's face.

The Zabini family, it turns out, had been careful neutrals during the late conflict. Blaise might have sneered like a Slytherin, but he wasn't remotely a Death Eater. Neville found this out because their next stop was the hospital wing, where Blaise's mother insisted on talking to Draco Malfoy. It was not a pleasant conference. Madam Zabini told Draco that his father was a disgrace to the Purebloods and that he had given them all a bad name, including Slytherin House, which now had the reputation of the Death Eater junior auxiliaries. Not least because of Draco's own role in the assassination of Dumbledore, _letting the Death Eaters into Hogwarts--_did he have no sense of decency at all? No wonder McGonagall had been forced to evacuate the seventh-year Slytherins as if they were all Death Eaters and Voldemort sympathizers. No responsible military leader could have done otherwise.

But the Greengrasses and the Zabinis and half a dozen other Slytherin families were _not_ with Voldemort, even if they weren't with the Order of the Pheonix. Make no mistake about that. And her only son was dead, and her family's reputation in ruins, and she was not blaming Minerva McGonagall but Lucius Malfoy. And Draco ought to feel some compunction too because hadn't Blaise been his friend? Or maybe he felt nothing, which wouldn't surprise her if the Malfoy son were as rotten as the father.

"And she shook her finger in his face and he just sat there in that chair trying not to cry," Neville said.

Which isn't at all what she would have expected from the smirking bully who had made fun of Ron's poverty and Neville's disabled parents and Harry's nightmares. But maybe it was different to be dressed down by one of your own, in particular by the bereaved mother of one of your school friends.

"And you were there the whole time?" Hermione asks.

"I was going to leave when she came in, but Draco told me to stay. It was very awkward, especially when she came up to me afterward and thanked me and said that she knew my grandmother was very proud of me." He shudders a little. "And I know she meant it, but she also meant him to hear."

"So are you _friends_ with him?" she asks. "You called him Draco."

"I don't know," Neville says. "but he doesn't correct me when I do it, and he calls me Neville. And it seems he's one of the children I'm looking after. I know it's really odd after all the things he's done, but I feel sorry for him. He misses his mother as much as any of the others do."

"She's in Azkaban on war crimes charges," Hermione says.

"I know. But it doesn't make him miss her any less." He drops his voice to a whisper and indicates the box of sweets he's set aside. "Don't tell Ron and Harry I did this, but it's his birthday and I'm bringing him treats. Just as I do for the other ones." He shakes his head. "I know I'm nobody's idea of a war hero. And I know that Draco's of age, but he just doesn't seem like someone who's really grown up."

She recalls aloud something that Boudicca Derwent said about the Healers. "They don't give out decorations for picking up the pieces."

Neville looks rueful. He nods, and tells her how he feels far out of his depth most days. He tries to keep the children occupied; there are plenty of projects to do with the reconstruction and the maintenance of the greenhouses, and it seems to do them good to work with living things. He doesn't know what to do about their rage at the old regime, except to make it clear that they're safe now and that those rules no longer hold. He's not sure what the rules really are now, but everyone is pretending very hard that things are back to normal.

"It's a school, so we'll teach," he says.

She says, "I'm not sure what the rules are, either." And she's not sure what she's doing next, only that she is bound to the wizarding world for some indefinite term until the Ministry works things out with Gringotts. She tells Neville about this in outline, leaving out what Bill said about first-born children.

"So you're paying the compensation to Gringotts," he says. She didn't expect he would connect the dots so readily, but this is his world more than it's hers.

"Every knut I have," she says. "They're going to find me some kind of job to pay the rest. And I have to find work in the Muggle world too because there are things to be paid on my parents' house, and I have to save up for their ticket home…" She puts her face in her hands and sighs. "Sorry, that's probably too much information."

"It explains why you're so worried," he says. "You need a holiday."

"No time," she says.

"Saturday," he says. "Tomorrow. I'm going to Gran's to go walking. Professor Sprout insisted I take a day off. Come with me. Gran would love to see you."

And there's really nothing more she can do tomorrow, so she accepts the invitation. Neville adds, "And the night of the full moon—that's the tenth—come here and we'll make sure your potion is prepared properly."


	7. Chapter 7

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

It's a warm windy day and they've been walking across the moors for six hours now. Hermione flooed to Neville's Gran's before dawn, thinking they'd pick up their rucksacks and go immediately. When she stepped out of the huge fieldstone hearth into the kitchen, both Neville and his Gran were sitting at table, and Hermione found herself pressed to join them for a grand breakfast: sausage and eggs and warm slices of crusty bread with butter and jam. She hasn't eaten so heartily since her student days at Hogwarts.

Neville's Gran thoroughly approves of her, and that approval shines not only in her hospitality but in the sharp appraising glance with which she favors Hermione, the glance of a shrewd woman well used to shoddy craftsmanship, who's unexpectedly faced with something sturdy and well-made. Her dark eyes sparkle in the early-morning gloom of the great kitchen. "Eat up, lass," she says. "Else our Neville will walk you off your feet." Neville looks away, blushing as he drinks the last of his tea.

Six hours later, she realizes that the redoubtable Mrs. Longbottom was bragging on her grandson's prowess as a long-distance walker. She's glad both for the substantial breakfast and for her own sturdy walking shoes. Neville is full of good cheer, pointing out the habitats of grouse and talking about the game books residing in the libraries of the local country houses, in which the lords of the manor have recorded hunts going back two hundred years and more. He knows the names of the grasses and wildflowers, both the folk and the Linnaean designations. She's feeling very self-consciously citified, because she doesn't know the names of half the flowers in her mother's garden, let alone of the abundance of flora here. She's ignorant, and she's on Neville's home ground. It shows in his confident posture and his easy, unhurried pace; he's eager to show her his long-cherished treasures and hopeful that she will appreciate them.

They are easing downhill to a welcoming little hamlet with a pub, and he proposes that they stop there before beginning the walk home. "One of my favorite places," he says. Once they're settled in a booth in the corner, he orders pints for them and she settles back to enjoy the sensation of not walking.

She sips her ale, and watches him over the rim of the glass. He's smiling, and his eyes are bright. There's no trace of the clumsy, apprehensive boy she's known for years. He looks at her and says, "I didn't know you enjoyed walking so much. But I might have guessed."

"Guessed how?" she says.

"You never committed to anything you didn't finish," he says. "You never gave up in the middle." He takes another sip of his drink. "And you were never mad for flying."

"So what's the relation between flying and walking?"

"Flyers look at the sky. Walkers look at the ground _and_ the sky. And some wizards sneer at walking because it's something that Muggles do."

Hermione thinks of Harry, who's incredibly at ease in the air and has been from the moment he first took hold of a broom. Harry, who's far from patient and something of a hothead. "Flyers miss a lot of detail," she says. "And maybe that's the case for a lot of wizards. If you have magic, there's a tendency to forget there are other ways of doing things."

Neville smiles. "It helps to belong to two worlds," he says. "Though I wasn't always sure that was a good thing. Especially when they were all waiting to see if I were a squib or not..."

Hermione abruptly remembers the story, which he always told in such a self-deprecating way that a casual listener might mistakenly take it for a joke: the uncle or great-uncle who dropped him out of a window to see if he'd bounce. "And if you _had _been a squib, you'd be dead now," she says.

"Gran was _furious_ with great-uncle Algie for that," he says. "I heard her having words with him about it after I got my Hogwarts letter."

Now she's curious. "So what do pureblood families do when their child gets the letter?" she asks. "Or is the big occasion earlier, when they know they have magic? Is that like the first steps, where the parents send out photographs?"

"I don't know what's usual. I know that my family wasn't sure because I was so slow. So they made sure I had a foot in each world; they sent me to Muggle school, and made sure I studied so that I could go to university eventually."

"So not all squibs end up like Filch," she says.

"Well, it varies. In some families, the squibs have a way of disappearing."

Hermione considers which families those might be. "So Draco might not actually be an only child." Neville nods.

"But Gran says there's nothing wrong with muggles, so why make a fuss about squibs." He lowers his voice. "Don't tell her I told you this, but her first husband was a Muggle. And I think there was _someone else_ before she married Granddad, and that one was a Muggle too."

She'd never thought of Mrs. Longbottom as anything other than Neville's Gran—certainly not as a woman who might have had grand passions. "So what did her family think of her first marriage?"

"Oh, it was a scandal. They eloped, and she didn't speak to her parents for years—oh, not until ten years after he died in the Great War."

Hermione does the maths and remembers the iron-grey hair and the dark eyes that miss nothing. She's astonished; Gran doesn't look much older than Headmistress McGonagall, who was a student at Hogwarts in the 1940s. "She doesn't _look_ that old."

Neville laughs. "She's a _witch._ Of course she doesn't look 'that old.' But she turned 103 last year. And she really has seen it all. She drove an ambulance during the Blitz and after a drink or two she will tell you her theory about Tom Riddle. Whom she's never called anything else, once she found out who the so-called Lord Voldemort was."

Hermione considers this while making inroads into her glass of ale, which is both very refreshing and surprisingly potent. The latter must be the reason the question even escapes her lips. "So what would you have been if you hadn't gotten your Hogwarts letter?" she asks. "Assuming that no one had dropped you out a window."

"Nothing too different from what I am now," he says. "Something to do with plants. A botanist, or a field biologist, or maybe an agronomist. I'd be starting university just now, assuming Gran had kept me out of harm's way in the war." He takes a long, considered swallow of his drink and looks at her. "Except I wouldn't have met you."

"Well, unless I'd never gotten my Hogwarts letter," she says. "In which case I would have been starting university this year too." She smiles. "Probably I would have done maths, or maybe computer science."

Neville smiles. "And we might have met after all. I might have been looking for someone to help me out with mathematical models for grouse populations. You know, those old game books are a treasure house of data." He laughs. "And we might have met even earlier, in chemistry lab. Where you would have prevented me blowing things up."

She laughs too. "Though I much doubt they'd turn loose the likes of Snape to run a chemistry lab…"

Neville says, "You'd be surprised. Gran says it doesn't do to have illusions about either side of the fence. Fools are thick on the ground in both worlds."

They relax, and have a second round, and when the barman comes to collect their glasses he smiles at Neville and says, "Good to see you again, lad. And who's your young lady?"

Neville blushes incandescently and then recovers himself. "This is Hermione Granger. She's a school friend. The brightest one in our year." He adds proudly, "The headmaster said she might be the brightest of our generation."

And then it's her turn to blush: first at being so extravagantly praised, and then at the realization that Neville dearly wishes she were in fact "his young lady." And finally at the thought that she finds this flattering rather than otherwise.

*******

**Hermione's journal**

**(undated - second week of June 1998)**

My familiar is a cat. Like him, I can't abide a locked room. Information isn't knowledge until it's known, and I live to know.

Neville has a toad, which like him is an amphibian, living with aplomb in two worlds.

Harry and Ron both had owls, and are themselves excellent fliers. Neville and I are earthbound, but high flyers miss the detail. Neville grew up taking twenty-mile hikes across the moors. He says there are few things that worry him seriously by the tenth mile.

One of these days I want to try flying again, this time not in a class full of hyper-competitive preadolescents. In my daydreams, I always fly by the sea. I'm skimming low over a stony beach or chalk cliffs. When I was fourteen, I had a recurring dream of flying side by side with a lover. It was fast, dangerous, competitive flying; we bloodied our knuckles against the other's broom handle as we strove to kiss in mid-air.

Obviously, I've never done anything like that in waking life. All my truly dangerous peak experiences have been solo flights, usually in a library on the trail of something I shouldn't know.

My new job makes me uneasy. I classify and I document. No one prevents me from reading everything that passes through my hands. I have dipped into every one of the Pensieve depositions for the war crimes trials. I have walked around inside the thoughts of people I know and people I don't. If it weren't for the oddly dissociated feel of Pensieve memories, this would feel indecent. I will write about this in more detail later. Right now it's enough to admit that I do it and that I don't intend to stop.

I have reviewed the magical defenses of Spinner's End, Malfoy Manor, even Hogwarts. I nicked some good bits for my parents' house: outer layer a very quiet notice-me-not Muggle repelling charm, and inner perimeter… well, inner perimeter is borderline Dark magic. Blood magic. I can get through, my parents can get through, but nobody else unless I let them. I won't write down here how I did this. These notes are encrypted now, but I don't trust it. Every measure has a counter-measure. Any code can be broken. I should know.

Interesting historical note: the present Malfoy Manor is built on the foundation stones of an earlier structure that was burned to the ground in the early seventeenth century. The fire, set by neighboring Muggles, accomplished its desired purpose.

Nausea here; take a breath and start over. Rewrite.

In the years just before the Statute of Secrecy, nearly the entire Malfoy family was burned to death in its ancestral home by witch-hunting Muggles.

They lied to us in History of Magic. Witches and wizards _can_ be burned—and have been. The Malfoys are paranoid isolationists (Abraxas, Lucius, Draco do _not_ exist in any Muggle records). I wonder if Lucius thinks that Arthur Weasley just doesn't understand how dangerous Muggles are. If so, I agree with Lucius. The record is not encouraging.

I have to give Draco some credit for being rude to me. After all, I'm probably the bogeyman he learned as a small child. Being rude to the bogeyman shows some spirit.

Query: was witch hunter Matthew Hopkirk any relation to Mafalda Hopkirk (Ministry of Magic)? Squib relative? Remember how Filch, the squib caretaker, kept putting in for permission to torture wayward students. How many witches and wizards killed in the witch hunts were turned in by squib relatives? Betrayed by family in deals to save their own necks?

Dean says the witch hunts have always smelled to him like the African slave trade. It takes your own to really sell you out.

I would have liked to have had a History of Magic class jointly taught by Lucius Malfoy, Arthur Weasley, Augusta Longbottom and Boudicca Derwent. An isolationist politician, a sentimental tinkerer, a survivor and a healer. The men with the big ideas and the women who cleaned up the mess. Ground rules: no hair pulling, no Unforgivable Curses, class points to be assigned by a neutral party (if you can find one). None of us would have slept through _that_ class.

***

**Author's notes:** The grouse population problem mentioned by Neville in the walking tour is a classical problem in population dynamics; the game books are a plot point in Tom Stoppard's play _Arcadia._ A.J. Hall (_Lust over Pendle, Dissipation & Despair, _and others) provided details on Neville, his grandmother, selected details of Malfoy family history, attitude toward the Ministry in outlying districts. I am following Hall in giving Neville's regional affiliation as the county of Lancashire, Pendle Hill area. In this chapter and subsequent ones, I have consulted RedHen (aka JOdel) for essays on Dark magic, wild vs. controlled magic, wizarding history, and problems with Rowling's world building.


	8. Chapter 8

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**Third week of June 1998**

"Wild magic." It sounds lovely and enticing, like the dark forest in the fairy tales. Not so much when you wake up and the drapes are on fire or you lose your temper and the table shatters, the garden wall deliquesces into rubble, or water pours into your room from nowhere. You're afraid when awake and afraid when dreaming, because _incendio _and _aguamenti _ and _reducto_ are by no means the limit of what tries to form itself, and you don't have to be awake. Maybe it's a piece of luck that the first flare of wild magic was the killing curse, because it warned you that this is serious business.

You count up the ways you were lucky. You were awake when it happened. You were paying attention. You were fortunate in the one who provoked it, because haven't you spent six or seven years hauling Ron and Harry back from the brink when Malfoy provoked them? And Neville was there, and he's always roused protective feelings in you, so the thought that it might kill him too was more than enough to make you let go of the intention.

Wild magic in childhood felt random, and separate from yourself. Things just happened. The cat sailed off the roof into your arms. Your hair turned purple. Whimsical, harmless things for the most part, actuated by childish desires, and not so far out of the range of ordinary probability. It took your parents quite a while to notice anything odd. Now you have seven years of training and with that you have focus, and that makes the flare-ups dangerous. You've been living at war for most of that time, and your catalogue of hexes, jinxes, curses and utility spells has rooted itself in your reflexes. The power surges, and all it requires is the assent of your will for very specific and terrible things to happen.

You ask if this is normal. Boudicca Derwent says that it's not unheard of, which is to say you're not the only one. This is a relief. She doesn't know how common it is; wizards don't do statistics. Faltering rather than flaring magic is more the norm, or at least that's what's indicated in the healers' textbooks. You remember Tonks' faded hair and fuzzy Patronus from sixth year.

"Pay attention to your thoughts," she says. "Pay attention to your feelings. Practice non-attachment. Don't let thought become intention." All of which sounds very like a self-help book, until she says "constant vigilance," which reminds you of Moody, dead these twelve months. _Constant vigilance won't necessarily save you, but it will extend your life a little_-- which in turn reminds you that you're still at war.

Which isn't incorrect, because the world outside is still at war. There's a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the three nights around full moon. Greyback's werewolves have proved far more elusive and dangerous than anticipated. The attacks this last full moon struck Hogsmeade, Ottery St. Catchpole, and Godric's Hollow—and the muggle suburbs of London. Rita Skeeter's article in the _Daily Prophet_ came within a hair of calling Shacklebolt's Ministry ineffective in dealing with the menace.

That's what the public knows. In the course of the last War Crimes Commission meeting, you learn what they don't know.

Boudicca Derwent mentions it casually as she reviews the list of Death Eaters to be interviewed for Pensieve deposition. They're all in Azkaban, of course, interned under the state of emergency. There's a complication which makes timely collection more urgent, she says. The Dementors have returned to Azkaban, and they're hungry.

"The condition of several key detainees has deteriorated significantly in the last weeks. Timely action is necessary if usable memories are to be collected for the deposition or, in fact, if the persons in question are to be competent to stand trial." Derwent's tone is dry and flat, which says "bad news."

Worse news, the Azkaban situation is taking on the character of an emergency because there are unconfirmed reports of the Dementors administering the Kiss without authorization, whatever it is that "authorization" means when you're dealing with soul-eating monsters. Worse yet, not all of the dementors have returned to Azkaban. Their population increase in the period of Voldemort's ascendancy means that the wizards' prison isn't sufficient to sustain them. And it isn't clear to whom, if to anyone, the rogue dementors have allied themselves.

Kingsley defers the remaining agenda items in the queue, in order to resolve the question. It will be nearly impossible to hold war crimes trials if the major defendants are teetering on the brink of madness.

You have a rare moment of culture shock. When the turn comes around to you, you forget your junior status and blurt out, "We should get them out of there. It's inhumane treatment of prisoners. Otherwise, how are we different from Voldemort?" What you don't say: you've been a prisoner yourself, however briefly, and this hits home.

Then it lands on you that the status quo ante at Azkaban _was_ inhumane treatment of prisoners, and this has now been restored. Madness and despondency are the norm, the treatment goal. Soul-eating monsters guard the island fastness and the prisoners have no escape, even to remembered happiness. Good memories are the first thing taken away.

You say, "You've frozen their assets and taken their wands. Aren't there enough Aurors to guard them under house arrest?"

Well, there's the little question of how reliable the Aurors are, but on the other hand there's the need of acceptable trials, because the international situation demands it. Diplomatic relations between wizarding Britain and the rest of the world have effectively been suspended since the end of the war. Derwent backs up your passion with dry, clinical testimony and says that absent action on this point, it will be moot in weeks. Which is to say that there won't be anyone sane enough to put on trial.

The resolution of the meeting is in favor of house arrest.

Which means that you've just secured the precarious freedom of your erstwhile captors. When you see the _Prophet_ three days later, Skeeter's lead article mentions you by name and sketches the rumors of your captivity at Malfoy Manor.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated - fourth week of June 1998)**

When one is a public figure, it becomes much more difficult to dodge arguments with friends. Rita Skeeter's article was inflammatory, as her articles always are, but it was substantially accurate. Yes, I did say that confinement in Azkaban Prison with Dementors in residence constituted a human rights violation. Yes, I did argue in favor of releasing the suspected and actual Death Eaters to house arrest pending the war crimes trials. Yes, I did all that as a very junior member of a high commission in a world that mostly doesn't accept me as a full citizen.

And yes, I was an unwilling guest at Malfoy Manor earlier this year. That's the part I _really_ don't want discussed in public, and Ron feels much the same—except that instead of saying it that way, he had to hit the other points first and say that he blamed me for making the big noise that got our private business splashed across the front page of the _Daily Prophet._

He added that he _completely_ disagreed with me about the Malfoys. Not only should they be slammed into Azkaban for the rest of their mortal days and the key thrown into the North Sea, but they should get more like what's coming to them. Starting with Crucio for a day or three and ending with the Dementor's Kiss.

Harry completely disagrees with this. He thinks that Narcissa should be pardoned and probably Lucius as well because Narcissa saved him and Lucius did abandon the cause at the end.

I add for the sake of accuracy: yes, Lucius abandoned ship when it was clear that the cause was lost, his Dark Lord an insane sadist, he'd lost out to Bellatrix as said Dark Lord's second-in-command (the price of which was a personal course of torture), and oh yes, the fate of his only child was in doubt. And I don't forget that it was Narcissa who identified me from my _last_ picture in the _Daily Prophet,_ turned me over to be tortured, and called me mudblood into the bargain. It wasn't just Lucius who taught Draco his nasty manners.

So I disagree with both of them. If I were to forget that Harry is my friend, I would call him a sentimentalist with a serious messiah complex, who has _zero_ comprehension of the notion of legal precedent. Pardoning Narcissa and Lucius would send a very bad message, and it doesn't reflect the substance of their actions over the last seven years and more. The treatment I got is _much_ more representative than what happened to Harry, and I was _lucky._ And he forgets that these people are _murderers. _I mean, I _heard_ Bellatrix tell Draco that if he didn't have the stomach to finish off the lot they'd dragged into the courtyard, he should leave them for her. Housekeeping instructions. Business per usual. (Oh yes, and the _contempt_ with which she said that, as if being incapable of the Killing Curse were a serious deficiency of character.)

And if I were to forget that Ron is my friend and my one true love, I would call him a bloodthirsty barbarian who is happy to recommend all sorts of torments as long as they land on his enemies. If he didn't approve of Crucio when I was on the receiving end, he shouldn't recommend it for Narcissa Malfoy. Or even Lucius. Merlin knows I hate Lucius. I hate him with an abiding fury I would find hard to retract if the man were to repent of everything and spend the rest of his days doing penance. But it still made me sick to see him tortured by Bellatrix and by Voldemort.

Harry agrees with me on that, because he was an eyewitness, as it were.

Also, I don't forget that I'm English after all, and much attached to the notion of trial by jury. If it was a bad idea for Sirius Black to have been sent to Azkaban without trial, then the same is true for Lucius and Narcissa. True, the particulars I know of them are unpleasant, but I think they should get their day in court. After all, even the bastards in the dock at Nuremberg got a day in court.

But then Ron had to start in about me and Neville rescuing Draco, which has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Nothing. Unless you want to get down to cases with Harry versus Draco and chalk up who cast which Unforgivable, in which case they're roughly even. (And _both_ would be sent to Azkaban, but I can't say that aloud.) Both of them cast Crucio and both of them cast Imperio. Draco put Madam Rosmerta under Imperio to commit his two unsuccessful murder attempts on Dumbledore, the ones that almost carried off Katie Bell and Ron. Harry cast it only once, and killed Travers as a side-effect. Which proves only that Draco is inept and has neither the inclination nor the ability for murder. And we already knew that (it's the only good news about him). He's a thoroughly nasty little racist brat, but not a murderer.

And in any case, Draco's not a major defendant in this case. Ron needs to stop being distracted by the fact that he and Draco hate each other's guts. Yes, Draco has been an obnoxious little prick from day one, aided and abetted, nay, _coached_ in said pursuit by daddy dearest. But he's not a major player and never has been. He is a stupid child who repeats everything that daddy says, without having the faintest notion what it really means. "Little tape-recorder ears," as my mother called the four-year-old next door who would enlighten you on his parents' home life if you let him prattle on. Daddy's little intelligence leak.

Then Ron jumped the track _again_ and started talking about how I spent far too much time at work and fell asleep when I got home, and obsessed about my missing parents when I was awake, and didn't do my share of the cooking. And he didn't like having a girlfriend whose name turned up in the newspapers in embarrassing contexts.

"_What_ embarrassing contexts?" I said. No, be fair. _I shouted._ "Do you mean being tortured? Or do you mean advocating some attention to human rights? Proper legal process? Common decency even for the fucking _Malfoys?_ If you don't restrain yourself from torturing your enemies, you may as well say torture is well and good in all cases, because that's what you're going to get."

"I just don't want to see my girlfriend's name in the _Daily Prophet._"

"So if I become Minister for Magic, are you going to read the _Prophet _with your eyes closed?"

"That's ridiculous."

"Which—reading the paper with your eyes closed or the idea I could be Minister?"

"Any of it. I just want an ordinary life and an ordinary girlfriend. I don't want to _read_ about you."

That's when I lost my temper and said what I shouldn't. "Well, you don't have to suffer in silence. You can end it any time you like."

"In that case, I will!"

And that was that.

A day or two later, Rita got wind of it and there was a spicy article about our breakup on the front page of the _Prophet_, including some unwarranted speculation about our sex life (if she'd really had the dirt, by that point it would have been _lack thereof_). As expected, she dragged in Harry as the cause of the breakup. Properly, she should have named the Malfoys in general and Draco in particular, but that's too kinky even for the _Prophet. _Everyone knows that celebrity couples do not break up over points of principle.

But Ron did get his wish. He didn't have to read his girlfriend's name in the paper because by then I was no longer his girlfriend.

In fact, I was no longer in residence at the Burrow. Molly made sure of that.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**At Grimmauld Place (undated)**

_Day zero_

I should date these but I don't care about the date. I am counting the days from The End of Things. This morning I moved out of the Burrow. Everyone pretends that I'm just taking some time by myself but I know that it's over. Ron and I are quits and Harry will follow Ron because he's family. Harry is going to marry Ginny but really he's marrying the Weasleys: Ron and George and Charlie and Bill and Molly and Arthur.

Seven years they were my family, too, but now I'm an orphan. At least till I get my parents back. Let me be fair, too: Neville is still my friend. And he has even less family than I do.

_Day one_

I hate 12 Grimmauld Place. Even at high noon, the light slants in through dust-grey windows and casts gloom. Grey limbo is the place I'm living till they disband the Order and I have to figure out what's next.

I had _that_ dream again last night. Enough said.

_Day three _

Today Andromeda went through the closets. She said Harry told her to take anything useful for her or baby Teddy. She's been putting it off, but today she finally felt strong enough to do it. There hasn't been a baby here in decades, but we came across clothes that belonged to Remus and Tonks. She started to cry and I tried not to, because someone had to be sensible. Remus' things were too shabby to be useful for much more than rags, and Tonks was smaller and wirier than her mother. More my size.

You can take those if you want, she said.

So now I have two pairs of Tonks' patched jeans and her Weird Sisters t-shirt and the purple tank top that says "Defending against the Dark Arts since 1149." Everyone in Tonks' graduating class of Aurors had one. Moody had growled at them about the Statute of Secrecy and not wearing it into Muggle London, and Tonks had told him that the secret of dealing with Muggles was knowing that they _never _took seriously anything printed on a T-shirt. Then she stuck her wand jauntily into her back pocket, just as he'd warned her not to do.

And then there's the stack of things she found in a bureau and shoved blindly into my arms, saying, "Take these too. Just don't…"

_Don't wear them so I can recognize them, _she meant.

The clothes smell like Tonks the last time I hugged her goodbye.

I cried all afternoon after Andromeda went downstairs. I shouldn't be crying. The war is over.

I fell asleep with Crookshanks curled against my belly. Bellatrix returned to torture me. Draco gloated in the background.

_Day five_

I can't stand this place.

Yesterday I ran for five blocks completely out of breath and cold with terror because in the crowd at King's Cross I saw a black-haired woman with red lipstick with a pale-haired boy. _It wasn't them. _

Bellatrix is dead. Draco is in the hospital wing at Hogwarts. Neither of them can be here.

Today I gathered my courage and went for a walk in Muggle London and got a coffee and a newspaper and sat on a park bench to read headlines that had nothing to do with Voldemort, or the casualty list, or the postwar reconstruction. I strolled back to Grimmauld Place and stood for a while under the trees and stared at Number 11 and Number 13. I live in the invisible nowhere, Number 12, the place in between.

I don't know what's wrong with me.

It doesn't matter if I sleep or not. Nightmare takes me at will in the full blaze of noon.

_Day seven_

I stopped back to Hogwarts to see Neville. He's still unofficial house parent to the orphans who remain at Hogwarts. It's not clear what will be happening in the fall, even though most of the repairs should be finished by September. He's helping Professor Sprout to repair the greenhouses.

He asked if I wanted to come along to visit Draco in the hospital wing. I didn't want to go, but Neville is my friend and I don't have a lot of those left. Draco was asleep, but Neville insisted on sitting there for a while anyway. I guess he's used to that with his parents. We didn't talk. You could hear birdsong from the grounds.

For some reason, the sleeping face reminded me of Tonks rather than the demon boy from my dreams. I remembered again that Tonks and Draco were first cousins.

But then everybody in this world is cousins with everybody else. Ron and Harry and Tonks and Sirius and Draco are all related. Even _Neville._ It doesn't matter if they hate each other or love each other. They're cousins.

I am the only one in this picture who isn't anybody's cousin.

***

**Author's notes:** Duinn Fionn. _The Waters of March_ (on skyhawke(dot) com) for Tonks' other T-shirt and her remarks about Muggle attitude to T-shirt slogans; the Weird Sisters t-shirt is canon.


	9. Chapter 9

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

The first time she visits the Burrow since her exile, it's by invitation of Dean Thomas, which is already odd enough. There's some matter that's disturbing him; he asks if she's received any letters—specifically, from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

She shakes her head in puzzlement; no, she hasn't. He looks at her, or maybe at something in the middle distance that just happens to coincide with her. Something is not right, and it's equally clear that whatever it is, he doesn't want to raise it just yet.

They're sitting in the yard at the Burrow, and she's brought a book about database security, because she's always reading now. Crookshanks stalks gnomes through the vegetable garden, happy to be released from his imprisonment at Grimmauld Place. Harry, Ron, George and Ginny are playing two-to-a-side Quidditch. She isn't clear if Dean invited her here just to ask that question, whose answer appears to have unsettled him. It would be awkward to leave, and just as awkward to stay, but inertia keeps her in place. She'd forgotten already how pleasant this place is.

Dean has made a similar decision, for he's sitting across from Hermione, drawing, as the Quidditch game progresses. It's not likely she'll be spotted, and she knows that those games can go on all afternoon. (Yes, and she read _Quidditch Through the Ages,_ so she knows just how ridiculous an official game can get.) She takes a last look at Crookshanks, who looks back at her as if to say, "Don't you have something to be doing?" Thus reproached, she opens her book and succumbs to the usual enchantment.

***

Dean looks up from his drawing and stretches his arms. "So what are you reading?" he asks. She holds up her book.

"Muggle stuff?"

"I'm keeping my options open," she says. "So what are you drawing?"

"Come look." She marks her place in the book and walks over. Dean has been sketching the Quidditch players; there's a really nice composition with Ginny silhouetted against the summer clouds as she dives for the Snitch, and another one with Harry just clearing the hedgerow, mirrored by his shadow on the ground and Ron in hot pursuit.

She remembers him drawing from their first year, but she had no idea he'd gotten that good. "Dean, these are excellent! You should think about selling them."

"I've sold a few, but mostly witches and wizards like pictures that move. That's the thing they keep saying, 'That's a great Quidditch picture, but why is it just frozen like that?'"

He lowers his voice. "I've sold a whole lot more of them to Muggles."

A year ago she would have been scandalized. Now she's just curious. "Isn't there a problem with the Statute of Secrecy?"

"Oh no. I sell them as fantasy art."

She giggles. "Dean, that's brilliant. So which ones do the Muggles like?"

"Want to see the portfolio?"

"Of course, unless you're asking me upstairs to see your etchings."

"No need to go upstairs. I have it here." He takes out the portfolio and opens it across their laps. It's quite extensive. She recognizes scenes from the Great Hall at Hogwarts: Dumbledore and McGonagall and Snape at the high table, Harry receiving an owl, Lavender and Parvati laughing together at something that's out of the picture. Lots of drawings of Ginny: in the common room, curled up with a book; out on the Quidditch pitch in full gear; in dueling stance with intense hawklike concentration. Various quick sketches of other Quidditch players, including Cho, Angelina, Harry, Oliver Wood, even an old sketch of Cedric. Dean turns that one over quickly and Hermione is just as glad he did. A whole collection of studies of the Slytherin table, obviously done on the sly: Draco and Pansy laughing at something, Draco looking daggers at the Gryffindors, flanked by Crabbe and Goyle, Blaise Zabini looking disdainful. Last of all are scary, atmospheric watercolors of battle, and she's surprised at the faces she sees: Bellatrix, Lucius, various other Death Eaters.

"Done from memory, obviously," Dean adds. "I started doing those to get the pictures out of my head, and it would be my luck that they're the big favorites with the Muggles. I actually had a professional illustrator come up to me at a fantasy convention and tell me that I had an _amazing visual imagination._" He laughs ruefully. "Would that it were imagination."

She realizes that she's never asked Dean what he did with his summers or holidays, and it appears that this is part of the answer. She's intrigued at the idea of the wizarding world as a fictional universe. "So who are their favorite characters?"

"The blokes love Bellatrix. I can't sell enough of her. The illustrator said she was edgy, a real_ femme fatale._ Wish he weren't so right. Lucius is a close second, but I think it's less his air of menace than his clothes."

Hermione bursts out laughing. "Oh my god, Lucius Malfoy as a fashion plate. Tell me more."

"They like Snape. I have to agree. He was an ugly bastard but really fascinating to draw. Dumbledore, of course, because he looks like everybody's idea of a benevolent wizard, and he did love those purple robes with the sparkles. He's loads of fun to do in color. Sprout and Flitwick, but usually in the background, for whimsy. McGonagall looks like a witch out of central casting, the illustrator told me, but she doesn't have that _je ne sais quoi._ No sex appeal." Hermione giggles again; she's never put McGonagall in the category of people who can or should be assessed for _sex appeal._

"So have you sold any pictures of us, I mean the students?"

"Some. Mostly it's the Slytherins. Blaise and Draco are the most popular. They went for traditional dress and that translates as 'real wizard.' There's one of the two of them playing chess that I've actually sold as an editioned print. I think it's the contrast; Blaise had that whole Renaissance-prince look and he's so dark, and Draco is so fair."

He pulls out the drawing. The background is an interesting shade of slate blue that sets off both boys' complexions, and she notices that Draco is playing the black pieces and Blaise the white ones. "Oh, this is beautiful," she said. "They're both so … alien. Not of this world. Alluring."

He takes out another picture. "Though somebody told me this one of Draco with his goons makes him look like a merchant banker playing Mafioso." Hermione looks at this one.

"I'd agree. He looks just like those public-school twits I'm meeting lately…"

Dean looks at her quizzically.

"Well, why did you think I was reading computer science? I'm doing computer security for banks. Keeping my options open."

"Are you thinking about leaving? I mean, crossing back over and passing as a Muggle?"

"Just about daily. It's really ugly here. The war isn't over; it's just on a slow boil. Not much better among the Muggles, actually, but those are different wars. I pass, though. They expect programmers to be eccentric. I wear jeans and Tonks' old T-shirts and they don't even ask me who the Weird Sisters are. I'm good at it, and it pays well."

She takes a breath. "I get the occasional lewd remark, but nobody ever calls me Mudblood."

Dean shrugs. "Well, I get it in both worlds. Just a matter of the M-word or the N-word. It doesn't feel very different."

Hermione nods. "It's all where they make the cuts. I remember the first couple of years at Hogwarts I noticed people's color, but after a while the Pureblood-Halfblood-Muggleborn thing seemed to take over. So Blaise might have been _black_ out in Muggle London, but at Hogwarts he was Pureblood and I was beneath his notice. Draco was the one who'd creep me out, though. He was always on about my bushy hair and my teeth, as if he spent a lot of time staring at me looking for things to pick on. I didn't let on, but he really made me feel like a _dirty exotic foreigner._"

She pauses.

"I remember when Lavender and Parvati first started getting silly over boys. They made up this running list of Most Fanciable for the boys in all of the houses. They had Blaise and Draco listed for Slytherin, and that made my skin crawl, the idea of even thinking of them that way. Not just nasty dispositions. _Not my kind, dangerous, the enemy, not human. _That's the day I knew I had assimilated."

Dean looks mischievous. "So do you ever think about dating Muggles?"

"I haven't thought about it. One of the merchant bankers asked me out last week, and I turned him down without thinking about it. Just too pleased with himself." She adds, "And he looked too much like Draco. I might have slipped and hexed him when he said something stupid. _And_ he was looking at me like I was an interesting exotic, you know, the scary girl genius who does magic with computers. I can live without that."

She turns to him, "So you're making money in the Muggle world, too… do you think about crossing over?"

"Only for business. I'd like to go to art school, actually… but the Hogwarts school-leaving certificate doesn't qualify me, and I didn't finish my NEWTs."

"If it's a matter of documentation, that's not a problem," she says, and doesn't realize it's a dangerous thought until it's already out of her mouth.

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – probably early July 1998)**

And how did I get my job?

Hermione Granger exists in the Muggle world, and there are seven missing years in her official biography. Those seven years were my canvas for the novel of my alternate life, what would have happened had I not gotten the Hogwarts letter. I made her mark in the world: I wrote the story in the databases and memory-charmed the personal references. Perfectly ethical, by my lights: what teacher doesn't want to have the memory of an outstanding student?

Like any good novelist, I resisted the siren song of personal vanity and restrained myself from making her a precocious Oxbridge student or any such. I don't need to be conspicuously brilliant, only plausible.

I'd done my costume research, too, so I sat in the interview in a crisp suit Transfigured from my everyday clothes into the very thing that serious young women in the City are wearing this year. I'd got it wrong, of course; I came in dressed like an aspiring stockbroker or merchant banker. But I got the job anyway.

I did a wee bit of wandless nonverbal magic, the baby sister of the Imperius Curse. _You really want to hire me, because I am amazing beyond your wildest dreams._ The difference is that Imperius is one of the Unforgivables, and what I did they forgive all the time. They call it charisma. Personal presence. Positive mental attitude. Sex appeal, though I very carefully kept sex out of it.

***

Grimmauld Place is nowhere you would want to sleep alone. It wouldn't be so bad if Andromeda and Teddy were there, but in the postwar emergency the Ministry is warning parents with young children to live in well-defended enclaves. Greyback's werewolves are still at large, and Andromeda knows better than anyone that places that were safe before are no longer.

And Hermione suspects that even if that weren't the case, Andromeda doesn't like revisiting Grimmauld Place because it reminds her too much of the lost: her daughter, her son-in-law, her favorite cousin Sirius Black. She herself doesn't like walking the halls after dark; the house itself feels inimical, even with the doxy infestations and the Dark artifacts summarily dealt with by the redoubtable Molly Weasley, and the old house-elf Kreacher in residence at Hogwarts.

The room at Grimmauld Place with the fondest associations is the kitchen, where Molly Weasley and Remus Lupin organized meals for the Order of the Pheonix and the long table seated the motley assembly. She remembers Sirius Black and Severus Snape glowering at each other from opposite ends of the table, and Remus hovering in the background and Tonks making faces to entertain her and Ginny, as if they were small children. Making faces, literally—shifting her features from the whimsical to the grotesque, including the array of funny noses (the pig snout was a great favorite).

And all four of them—Snape, Black, Lupin, and Tonks—are dead now. Molly marches on, having avenged three of the four of them when she dispatched Bellatrix in the battle of Hogwarts. Much as she dislikes Molly, she has to admire the woman's unsinkable vitality.

Three years ago. She remembers one morning at Grimmauld Place, at that long kitchen table, she was sitting across from Tonks as she laughed and changed her faces—colors flashing by, features changing, and she wondered: "Did anyone ever ask you to look a certain way? I mean a lover? Because to me your constant change is sexy, you're a kaleidoscope." She was fifteen, and didn't know Tonks well enough to ask that question. Tonks was twenty-two, a full adult and newly minted Auror, glamorous because she stood just on the other side of the magical gateway to real life in the wizarding world.

She remembers looking at the muscles in Tonks' arms and the way her hands wrapped around her coffee mug and something twinged in her chest. This is a real warrior, she remembers thinking, even if she's clowning for us, but those hands---and the way Tonks would laugh at scary old Moody, and he _was_ scary with that spinning blue glass eye—well, Hermione was fifteen at the time so she didn't know what that feeling was exactly. She just knew that Tonks was the face her eyes found at that table. Well, the face she found second, after Ron. But she'd wanted Ron since she was twelve years old.

She sits on the long bench in the place where Tonks once sat, and stares into the empty fireplace. She comes down here to Floo to the Ministry, and to cook her solitary meals. She's not sure of the defenses of the place, and she's spending some of her time setting up defenses of which she _is_ sure at her parents' empty house in the London suburbs, which is her base of operations for her contract programming. (None of her electronics work at Grimmauld Place.) She spent the last of the money that's in her name buying herself a laptop, and now she's splitting her time between two jobs and two houses. And the thing of which she is chronically short these days is time… time, of which there's only so much. And time really is money now.

And she isn't sure that she wants to stay in the wizarding world. If they consigned her to non-existence as a racial inferior once, they can do it again—to her, or to any children she might bear. That makes her faithful with the vile purple potion that holds off the possibility. Even if she sleeps alone now, she's superstitious. She escaped the fate of the wandless muggle-born refugees in Diagon Alley, but that could happen on another turn of the wheel. _No hostages to fortune, _she thinks, _nor to the Goblins either_.

Keeping her options open means building a full-time identity in the world of her birth, which means making up for lots of lost time and the secondary-school diploma she doesn't have. Dean put the idea in her head, if she hadn't already been thinking about it. Crossing over. Crossing back. But there's not enough time.

Once upon a time, she had the luxury of time… extra time, whenever she needed more. Time to double back, time to do it over…time to sleep.

Aha.

Third year. The time-turner.

She goes to the fireplace, lights it, throws in a handful of Floo powder, fire-calls Minerva McGonagall at Hogwarts. Time to call in some of her war-hero favors while it's yet remembered what she did.

McGonagall is in, tells her to Floo directly to her office in fifteen minutes. This will be convenient because she has some matters she'd like to discuss as well.

Hermione runs upstairs, throws on her school robes over her jeans and sweatshirt, tucks her infinitely expandable beaded bag in the pocket of her robes… takes one last look over her desk. There's that hank of blond hair in the onyx and silver clasp, that she's three times forgotten to turn in to the authorities. She's sick of looking at that nasty souvenir every time she sits down to work… well, she can hand it over to McGonagall and have done with it.

Out of ancient habit, she detaches a small lock of the hair and some of the dried blood and files them in an envelope. _You have the instincts of a Dark magician, _her conscience says. But it doesn't stop her filing the envelope in her beaded bag before she puts the rest of the queue in her pocket.

***

On stepping out of the fireplace in the Headmistress's Office, the very first thing she does is to drop the bundle of Draco's hair on McGonagall's desk. "I forgot to turn this in," she says.

McGonagall picks it up and looks at it in puzzlement.

"From the attack. Neville told me to make sure nobody got hold of loose hair… for Polyjuice," she says. McGonagall frowns. She clarifies. "When they attacked Malfoy, they cut this off," she says. McGonagall nods.

"But surely this wasn't your sole reason for coming here."

"No. I wanted to ask you for a favor. With the Ministry. Since you did it last time… and I'm short on time…" She's not making sense and knows it. "You know I'm working at the Ministry now. Paying off the compensation to Gringotts for the war damage. And they're taking everything I make, so I don't have any money here. And there's the other world, and my parents—I have to save for their ticket home, and take care of their house."

"Gringotts does currency exchange," McGonagall says.

"Not for me," Hermione replies. "The Goblins are _implacable._ When they say I'm paying compensation, they mean _every knut._ I already made the mistake of bringing muggle money over for exchange, and they took it for the debt. So I need to work in the other world. More or less full time. While I'm working for the Ministry, also more or less full time…"

"I see," McGonagall says. "You know that the Ministry's stock of time-turners was mostly destroyed…"

"Mostly," Hermione says. "And I thought that Dumbledore might have salted something away."

McGonagall smiles, a shrewd expression in which her eyes are only half involved. "I'll see what I can do. And meanwhile, you're staying at the Burrow?"

"No, at Grimmauld Place. The arrangement at the Burrow… fell through." She really doesn't want to elaborate and figures that McGonagall will have seen Rita Skeeter's tasteless article in the _Daily Prophet._ "And I need to be on the Floo network for work at the Ministry."

"It's not wise to be staying there alone," McGonagall says. She adds dryly, "As a member of the Order, I can tell you that the Ministry directives on the post-war situation are _understating_ the dangers. If you like, I can talk to Molly Weasley…"

"I would really rather you didn't," Hermione says, acutely uncomfortable at the notion of spelling out her differences with Molly to the Headmistress. "It's personal… to do with Ron…"

McGonagall nods, with an expression of distaste. "Yes, I saw the article in the _Prophet. _I had rather hoped it was Ms. Skeeter spinning rumors… I suppose it best then that we find you other accommodation." She pauses. "Were you to be given a time-turner, I would expect you to be using it _under supervision,_ as before. Which means that you will be reporting to me, weekly. And for that purpose it would be most convenient to arrange a room for you at Hogwarts."

Hermione says that she won't need more than a place to sleep and a desk, just as when she was a student; a spot in the dormitories would suffice. McGonagall tells her that the dormitories are currently serving for the war orphans, so she'll arrange accommodations on the apprentices' corridor that's been hastily organized from disused classrooms.

"So you and Mr. Longbottom will be neighbors again," she says. "Speaking of which, I would like to commend you for your quick thinking in the late unpleasantness with Mr. Malfoy. Madam Pomfrey was most impressed with you and Mr. Longbottom."

Hermione says, "Neville did most of the work. I just helped."

McGonagall says, "Your help was crucial. He could not have taken the patient to the hospital wing had you not provided defensive cover, not to mention aid in breaking up the original disturbance." She looks appraisingly at Hermione. "Mr. Malfoy remains in the hospital wing for the foreseeable future. He has been having serious difficulties with ordinary magic and is unable to defend himself."

Hermione says, "But Neville said we got there before they could do him much harm…"

McGonagall cut her off. "Mr. Malfoy's difficulties predate the attack. He had not seen fit to mention them before." Hermione remembers Neville's puzzlement that a pack of second- and third-year students had succeeded in disarming a seventh-year student _by hand._ Now she understands. "I need not remind you that I am telling you this in confidence. Nor can I sufficiently express my appreciation for your efforts on behalf of a fellow student with whom you have had differences in the past."

Hermione doesn't tell McGonagall that those _differences_ involved Malfoy looking on while his aunt tortured her, nor that she almost killed him in the hospital wing. Instead she asks, "So he can't do _any_ magic?"

"He cannot predictably cast ordinary spells. Mr. Longbottom has been helping him to learn alternative methods for tasks of daily living." She adds, "He insists that he is having no problems with flying, but Madam Pomfrey is not willing to let him attempt it just yet."

There's a long pause in which Hermione considers the implications. _Neville Longbottom is helping Draco Malfoy to adjust to life without magic,_ she thinks. _Funny how things turn out._

Finally she asks, "Is it permanent damage?"

McGonagall sighs. "It's a common side effect of severe emotional distress. For Mr. Malfoy's sake, I certainly hope it is not permanent."

Hermione remembers her conversation with Neville about how pureblood families deal with squibs, and how they both guessed that the Malfoys quietly disappeared theirs.

McGonagall adds, "When you are resident here, I will expect you to help Mr. Longbottom when he requires it." She pauses and gives Hermione a speaking look. "And to exercise the necessary discretion regarding Mr. Malfoy's condition."

Hermione nods. _More secrets,_ she thinks. _My whole life here is bounded with secrets and oaths of silence._

McGonagall continues, "For both political and humanitarian reasons, it is critical that Mr. Malfoy come to no harm during his stay at Hogwarts. You are no doubt aware that his parents have been removed from Azkaban to house arrest at the Manor. Their good behavior is being secured by their son's presence at Hogwarts."

Hermione doesn't ask the question, but apparently her facial expression does, because McGonagall replies, "Should the Malfoys violate the conditions of their house arrest, their son will be removed to a _more secure location._"

Hermione says, "You mean Azkaban." McGonagall nods.

*******

**Author's notes:** Duinn Fionn (on skyehawke (dot) com) aka Geoviki (on LiveJournal) for the initial germ of Dean's analysis on race in the wizarding vs Muggle worlds (chapter 4 of _A Thousand Beautiful Things_) as well as the idea of him pursuing a career as an artist on the other side of the border. His interest in drawing is canon, as is his passionate interest in sport.


	10. Chapter 10

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated - first week of July 1998)**

The dreams seem to know that I'm sleeping in a new room. Now it isn't Bellatrix but the snatchers—I'm dreaming a repeated loop of the moment when they dragged us out of the tent and I just had time to hit Harry with a jinx to make his face unrecognizable. I never did ask him if it hurt. I don't think any of us were thinking about that at the time.

That moment that plays over and over. And then I wake up, uselessly early. It's four or five in the morning, too early to get up, too late to think about more sleep, and I'm still on high alert. So I'm lying awake without being about to do anything about it.

This room doesn't have windows, so I have wandlight or candles and that's it. No fire, of course, because the bed curtains keep me warm enough through a summer night.

Over and over. It's the way that I used to review my tests, what I answered on what item. In this case, the test item is the casting of that jinx. I don't know why my brain has fixed on that. It was all I had time to do, and it worked, or so I tell the examiner in my brain. They—the enemy—didn't recognize Harry, and that bought us enough time—enough time to be saved by chance.

Only then that takes me to another thread, which I don't want to think about. The questioning. I knew it wasn't going to end well, no matter what happened, but it was those agonizing moments when Lucius dragged Draco over to look at us, and he mumbled and shuffled and didn't know. "Yeah, could be," he mumbled, when Lucius asked him if it was Harry, which was odd because he never was a mumbler before. I would have expected him to be crisp and certain about it, and recommend Ron and me both for torture forthwith even if he wasn't sure about Harry.

Fifth year, I remember him looking us all over when Umbridge had caught us out in her office, and she was going to torture us right there. I remember that look: pale eyes alight and gleaming, yes and (the really repellent detail) the gleam on his lips too—he must have been licking them. Avid, greedy for the naughty parts which were about to transpire. Nasty. He was fully expecting to get off on it.

Maybe he just didn't expect to be asked to identify people he knew. Or didn't want the Dark Lord summoned because he was more afraid of him than he was eager to get us back…

I really don't want that nasty little git in my brain at four a.m. But there he is, lodged like something stuck in an impossible-to-reach spot. What bothers me about that memory is how it doesn't line up at all with what we've known about Draco since first year…

Fourth year, when we were fourteen. The little Death Eater reunion at the Quidditch World Cup. He was lounging there at the edge of the woods, pointing at the Muggles lofted sixty feet above the ground and jeering that I'd best keep my head down if I didn't want to be up there too showing my knickers. I've been threatened with worse since, but for some reason that still gives me a chill. Coming-of-age for a baby Death Eater is threatening the Muggle-born girl with your rudimentary idea of sexual humiliation.

Well, if it comes to it, he's gotten his comeuppance for that comment. Neville still won't tell me what they were threatening to do to him, but that refusal and the fact they were starting by tearing off his clothes… and the way he couldn't stop shaking afterward.

I am absolutely not going to feel sorry for him. Except that when Neville told Ron what happened and Ron started laughing, I felt chilled to the bone. And that was the beginning of the end with Ron, wasn't it? I refused to laugh along at the humiliation of an enemy. Not that Draco wasn't perfectly vile about Ron's family (more coaching at home, I'm sure). And about Harry. And about Neville's family—except that Neville seems to have forgiven that, or made allowances for Draco being all talk. After all, he's been launching these little verbal missiles at us for six years, and judging his next effort by how big a flinch he got. I don't think he actually ever thought about the reality behind his words. After talking about how Ron's mother was fat and Ron's father was shabby, he turned into a bundle of hissing indignation if you said anything about his parents.

Particularly after his father went to prison.

And as an Azkaban escapee, Lucius is up for the Dementor's Kiss, unless I misunderstood something. I suppose they're holding off for the trial. I really want to hope that it will be a real trial, but their notion of justice seems to change with the seasons.

Ye gods and goddesses, I want to _sleep._ There's plenty of time to think about this tomorrow.

***

After a week or so of systematic cataloguing of the Pensieve vials and unsystematic sampling of same, Hermione learns that this has been Derwent's test of her curiosity.

The questioning begins in the usual way, over tea and biscuits. Quite nice biscuits, in fact, Hermione notices. Today's are shortbread, not a whit inferior to those that Headmistress McGonagall serves to visitors.

At first, she's asked how the cataloguing is going, and she answers, truthfully, that it is coming along nicely, although it's occasionally obscure who collected certain memories. In other cases, the identity of the donor is unclear. Some vials have multiple initials on them. She's set those aside, along with those whose collection date is uncertain.

She's already making notes about what items of information should be attached to a particular memory. For the most part, there's one memory per vial, although there are exceptions—for example, the vial labeled "2.5.1998 SS (Posthumous HJP)." This appears to be an anthology, so they'll have to attach an identifying number to each vial and memory separately. (A vial may contain more than one memory.) At a minimum, she's thinking each memory should be marked with collection date, donor, collector, and the beginning and end dates for the events in the memory.

Derwent sips her tea and nods approvingly. "That's good. You're already thinking about what you want to put in the structure. Don't worry your head yet about the details. That's why we have the Arithmancy and Charms folk in reserve. They know their business better than either of us ever will. Our task is to know what to ask of them."

Hermione frowns. "So what will queries look like? I'm assuming some kind of complex spell… maybe an _Accio_ with an elaborated direct object? Like 'Accio all vials containing memories collected by BD, HJP or HS between 1995 and 1998 inclusive'… or are you more interested in summoning the details of the memory than the container?... Does the War Crimes Commission know what questions it wants to ask?"

Derwent smiles. "That's one of the challenges, I'm afraid. They actually have very little idea of what we're about here, and some of them have less interest. Nor do they have an entirely clear picture of what they wish to accomplish even as it bears on their own work."

Hermione shrugs. "Oh well, they don't sound too different from Muggle clients, in that case." She takes another biscuit and tries to nibble it without making too many crumbs.

Derwent says, "That's why we're both attending the War Crimes Commission meetings, including the tedious ones." She takes another sip of tea and smiles. "Particularly the tedious ones. And the ones where no one is saying aloud what they mean." Another Mona Lisa smile. "So, of your preliminary review of the memories, what do you find most interesting?" Hermione's taken aback momentarily. "I assume you've been dipping into them, to get an idea of what's there."

She nods. "Well, I was intrigued by the set of vials collected by…" (she recites the initials carefully, not having seen quite so many on any of the other vials except for the ones collected by Dumbledore) "…E.A.S.S.C.N.L…"

"Ah yes, the Thaumaturgical Engineering Consultant. What did you make of them?"

"I wasn't quite sure what they were, at the beginning. They're always at dawn or dusk, and there's just the one person—I'm assuming that's the donor, the witch in the black cloak?—pacing out the perimeter around some building." Derwent nods. Good so far. "And I—er, recognize some of those buildings." (Malfoy Manor, at least, and Spinner's End, an ugly mill-worker's row house that could be sarcastically designated Snape Manor.) "And she's doing a whole series of spells that seem to set off various reactions. In at least one case she has—what, homunculi?—that she sends across the perimeter lines." She gulps. "And some not particularly nice things happen to some of them. So I'm guessing she's studying the defenses. Then I found a whole set of parchments in the supporting documentation with the specifications for the spells, and what she figured out about the defenses."

Derwent smiles. "That's another art they don't teach at Hogwarts. Tradecraft, as you noted about the memory charm. Of course, it's all applications of what you learned there."

Hermione says, "I really liked some of her little gadgets. The one with the prisms and the brass dragons is really nifty. The thaumaturge, it said in the documents." She frowns. "Though I would never have thought of using homunculi as…er, crash dummies."

"A relatively rare practice, actually. You only do it when you suspect you're up against a fair bit of Dark magic—specifically, Dark blood magic."

At this point, Hermione makes a conscious point to sound less knowing than she actually is. She's actually figured out this bit herself and has used it to test the design for the defenses on her parents' house. "So why does she use two different sets of homunculi?"

"Blood magic, remember. One set is incubated from the blood of the Family, and the other is—well, Other."

"So blood-magic defenses are like the immune system of the house." Derwent goes politely blank, and Hermione remembers that what she knows of modern medicine is actually _alternative medicine_ in this world. "The house recognizes the Family and rejects the Other." Derwent nods.

"So that's why Twelve Grimmauld Place never liked me," Hermione says.

"A very fine example of modern blood-magic defenses," Derwent says. "The Engineering Consultant speaks very highly of that one, although she's never had the opportunity to study it. It's fortified with nearly every defensive charm known at the time of the First War with Voldemort, and those defenses have never been breached. Very powerful and very subtle at the same time."

"And it was under Fidelius on top of that," Hermione adds. "The Spinner's End defenses are similar, I think. Though there are some nasty little twists. Severus Snape was not a nice man, and from what I've seen he had little cause to be trusting."

Derwent nods again. "More tea?"

Hermione offers her cup and the teapot levitates to fill it. "The defenses on Malfoy Manor, on the other hand, are a lot simpler but there are more layers. Rather like a castle, with the moat and then the outer wall and the keep and so forth, with escalating nastiness the further in you go." She shudders and tries to put out of her mind what she remembers of the place. The mysterious Engineering Consultant only saw it from the outside, at least in the memories she's reviewing.

"And of the personal memories you've reviewed, which did you find most interesting?"

That question is easy to answer. "Severus Snape. I think because I knew the man, or thought I did."

"So how did the memories change your mind?"

Hermione finishes her tea, puts her cup down and Vanishes the buttery crumbs on her lap. "Well, to begin… He was an appalling excuse for a teacher, but he really knew his stuff. And he hated me personally, or that's the impression I always got. He certainly hated some of my friends, and he favored students from his own House. So that's my point of view as an ex-student of Professor Snape." She pauses. "And the rest is public record: he killed Albus Dumbledore, he was Headmaster of Hogwarts under…" (she wants to say Voldemort, but catches herself in time to substitute the official locution) "… under the Thicknesse Ministry, and he was killed by Voldemort's familiar Nagini during the Battle of Hogwarts.

"But when I started to dig into the memories…" she takes a breath. "Okay, some of it was personal. When I saw the bullying, the way he was treated… even by people he should have been able to trust… all right, I know those memories aren't the whole picture, but I can see why he might have been attracted to Voldemort's program. He was younger than I am when he joined, and then he spent the next fifteen years making up for it. And he was boxed in, absolutely reduced to _no choices left_ by the end of it. The memories from the assassination of Dumbledore are really horrible. He was blackmailed into it from two sides: Narcissa Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange on one side, and Dumbledore on the other."

She adds, "He had an absolutely thankless role to play. Everybody hated him by the end of it, and he played that role up to the very last." By now the tears are standing in her eyes. "You know, the label on that vial isn't accurate. There's another set of initials that should be on there. It should be HJG as well as HJP. I helped collect it, in lieu of administering first aid. We thought he was the enemy, so we just let him die."

"You are not a trained Healer," Derwent says.

"I knew _enough,_" Hermione said. "I could have at least made an attempt. Aren't medics supposed to help people from either side?"

Derwent says, "I understand why you feel as you do, but you should remember that you were not bound by a Healer's Oath."

Hermione says, "But I should have tried. What bothers me is that I didn't try, and I didn't think to try. It's not much of an excuse, but I was thinking like a soldier. And as far as I'm concerned, Snape was a lot braver than some of us who got public credit for it."

It's late, much too late, and nothing she can do is going to change what happened. The only thing left is a gesture, and she knows it's empty. "I know that posthumous praise isn't worth much, but I'd really like to see his Order of Merlin upgraded to First Class." She remembers that he'd really, really wanted that back in third year, for capturing Sirius Black—and he'd been disappointed. Rather the story of his life, actually.

Derwent says, "I came to the same conclusion on viewing those memories. I understand that your friend Mr. Potter has already approached Minerva McGonagall about this matter, but your additional endorsement will be most helpful."

She puts her cup down and favors Hermione with a smile that's brilliant in its beneficence. "I think you will make a most excellent Recording Angel for the War Crimes Commission. You are capable of changing your mind, which is the first qualification of an historian."

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Some notes about Snape**

And here's what I didn't say to Boudicca Derwent this afternoon, because it really was too personal:

I felt sorry for that grubby little boy, the one who grew up to be Professor Snape. There's something ratty and desperate and hungry about him even at nine years old, and I don't know if it would have made a difference if he'd found real friends when he got to Hogwarts.

And there was something familiar about him, that tugged at me. Tugged at my heart, specifically—as if I'd seen a feral cat who looked like Crookshanks. I know if I tried to pick up such a creature it would claw my arms to shreds, but it doesn't keep me from feeling the impulse. I couldn't figure out what was so familiar, though, until I got back to Hogwarts and I was sitting at dinner listening to Neville tell the story of his day. It was those round, warm Northern vowels. Neville has the same accent as little Severus Snape, an accent that Snape had managed to shed by halfway into his first year at Hogwarts.

And it's very middle class of me, but my first urge with that grubby little boy would be to throw him in a tub and scrub him clean—including that regrettable hair—and then to feed him up properly and put him in clothes that fit. I don't know if he would have been amenable to hugs and bedtime stories; by age nine, he seems to have been more acclimated to hexes and duck-and-cover.

I must say some other things too, that I daren't ever say to Harry.

Lily Evans, his mother, looks frighteningly like Ginny Weasley. Maybe it's my eyes, but they could pass for sisters. I can't help wondering if some male Weasley or Prewett of a previous generation got up to some mischief in the Muggle world. The resemblance is just uncanny. I really don't want to think about the implications. Just recite that comforting mantra: in the wizarding world, everybody is everybody else's cousin.

And I don't like James Potter. At all. I can't think of anything that would make up for what he and his friends did to Severus: dangling him upside down in view of everyone, making fun of his ragged underwear, and then taking it off. And Lily sold him out. I'm sorry, but the M-word uttered under duress doesn't count as betrayal. Shouldn't count. Doesn't count with me.

In present tense: points to Draco. Unless there's something I'm forgetting, I think that James Potter trumped him for sheer nastiness before he was even born. (Excepting his brief career as a not particularly successful baby Death Eater, that is, and the jury is still out on how much of that was Draco's choice in any case.) What's _very_ clear is that James Potter was acting in perfect free will, and he chose to be an obnoxious prat.

Sirius Black, well, I'm really disappointed in Sirius, because he seemed like a good fellow and it turns out he was party to that disgraceful scene. Not to mention pointing Severus in the direction of Remus Lupin at full moon. Nasty, nasty, _nasty_ piece of work. I'm trying to remember, but I don't think I ever heard Sirius express any regret about what he did to Severus.

And here I am referring to my dead, very much ex-Professor by his first name. Oh, well, no more House points to be deducted for that. Unless Snape, excuse me, Professor Snape, can do that from beyond the grave.

***

**Author's notes:** The thaumaturge is borrowed from A.J. Hall (_Dissipation and Despair_); the notion that Ginny Weasley looks too much like Lily Evans, from Arsinoe de Blessenville (see _The Golden Age_). The speculation about Snape's class and region, initially from JOdel aka RedHen, though I have seen it mentioned elsewhere (I believe it's also mentioned in one or more essays on HPLexicon).


	11. Chapter 11

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Second week of July 1998**

I spend my days shuttling between one locked room and another. Outside one of those locked rooms I'm famous. I was nobody in particular for so many years, and didn't expect to be anyone until long into adulthood, if then. Now I can't cross Diagon Alley without someone accosting me and thanking me for my work in the war, or just confirming that I'm who I look like, or saying that their child was at school with me two years ahead or three years behind… and yes I suppose I know most all of my schoolmates by sight, but I wasn't much of anything to them then and now I'm a name to reckon with.

But not in any useful way.

For one thing, I have no money in that world, and that means that anything I need, even so small as a piece of parchment or a quill, I have to depend on someone else to get me. Whatever writing I do in this world, I do in my office at the Ministry. In the other world, of course, I write with ball-point pens on paper, or type on the computer, which is a very different affair entirely.

Between one locked room and another.

In the other world, I'm anonymous, except for my name dangling from a badge. I'm just a particle in the rush-hour crowds in the City, another face at the café or pub, a no-one-in-particular young woman who can pass for mid-twenties if she tries. The only hazard in that world is the men who try to chat me up as I'm sitting in public. A discreet notice-me-not takes care of that. I know I'm not supposed to be doing magic out there, but that's self-defense.

In that world, the place in which I work is sleek and hard-edged, black plastic and smoked glass and putty--office colors, lit by the blue glow of the computer screen. No one knows my name, which is a mercy. It's just me and the cool darkness and the tippytap of fingers on keyboard as I wrestle with the code that doesn't yet do what I want it to do. That eats hours like enchanted sleep, and they pay me well for it. When I'm done, I go home to the locked room, set the time-turner back to dawn, Apparate to Hogsmeade and hike up to the castle to get to the Floo and go to work. I sleep that night at Hogwarts.

I hardly see anyone. At the Ministry, I can go down a few floors to the Auror office to see Harry and Ginny. (It's still awkward seeing Ron.) Most days, that's not tempting, because my work load is so heavy. I'm sorting through all the memories they've collected for the Pensieve. So far, I'm just wandering through quickly, on fast-forward as it were, to see who shows up besides the donor. Derwent collected most of them so the documentation is good; I know at least what it's supposed to be: what date, what place, if only approximately.

And from time to time unexpectedly I trip over horrors…

… such as today, the memory curiously labeled "1.8.1997 HJP/TMR?" HJP is Harry. I step into the Pensieve and I'm ricocheting between Grimmauld Place and someplace else. August first. Yes, I remember this, when we first got there after escaping from that ambush in Tottenham Court Road, and Harry had a headache and excused himself to run down the hall. I'm ricocheting between Grimmauld Place and somewhere dark. Very dark. Lit by firelight, and there's a man screaming on the floor. A big man, blond, with his face contorted into a mask of agony and his limbs flailing, hands grasping at nothing. And in the shadows, firelit…

Looming over him is a white mask of a face, red-eyed, that I know all too well.

The point of view is not Harry. TMR would be our old friend Mr. Riddle.

Oh.

The voice coming out of that inhuman face is at least an octave higher than Harry's, high and thin, with exaggerated sibilants. Like synthesized speech, I'd say, if I were back in the other world. _Not a human voice,_ but nonetheless saying words.

"Again, or feel my displeasure," it says.

He's not talking to the man on the floor, but to the torturer. The torturer's apprentice, I should say, who's tall only by contrast with the supine figure on the floor—and whose face is almost as distorted as that of his victim, but in abject frozen terror instead of pain. And I recognize that face. Yes.

By virtue of what I just saw, Draco is up for at least one life term in Azkaban, because what I'm witnessing is successful casting of Cruciatus. Under duress, but nonetheless one of the Unforgivables. Only I don't know if this memory counts or not, because it appears to be Voldemort via Harry, and I'm not sure what the legal status is for testimony of the possessed.

And yes, I suppose I know what the GW/TMR vials are now, as well. Ginny's recollections from her time of possession in second year. Only those have memory gaps, which Boudicca Derwent tells me we will have to fill in using special methods. Potions and spells, with particular care so we don't wreck the surrounding stuff that's still Ginny. But that's another story.

*******

And then there's the paperwork… or parchment. Piles of it.

It's quarter of four when Hermione finds the gap in the diplomatic correspondence. She's already been all day figuring out—or conjecturing—how wizarding diplomacy works. Muggle wars don't necessarily affect wizarding borders, so the Central European consortium of Ministries for Magic is roughly co-extensive with the Austro-Hungarian Empire at its height, combined with the German Empire less Alsace-Lorraine… or maybe it's the Holy Roman Empire. And the borders are different for different activities: sport (more or less the modern—i.e. Muggle—national boundaries); diplomacy (consortia); defensive functions (consortia, private or family alliances).

Once more, she is muttering imprecations about the inadequacy of the Hogwarts history curriculum, and she really wants to get this part wrapped up and into the records before she leaves tonight. She's superstitious about leaving a task unfinished overnight.

The same signature appears over and over again: P. Weasley, the faithful aide of Minister Thicknesse. P. Weasley was a very busy fellow in those heady days of the Thicknesse Ministry when the Pureblood supremacists were getting it all their own way. What she's investigating just now is the extradition orders for Muggle-borns and Order sympathizers, sent out over his signature to the foreign Ministries for Magic.

P. Weasley, of course, is Percy Weasley, and if she were still persona grata with Molly she could skip official channels and do a quick Floo call to the Burrow to find out where he's working these days. She could as well ask Arthur, but since he works at the Ministry, that's a little stickier. She really isn't sure of the politics. Derwent told her to tread carefully when dealing with _anything_ in the Ministry, so she goes the careful and official route.

Careful and official takes an hour and a half, and that's the _expedited_ time because of her celebrity status. So it's six o'clock by the time she approaches the tiny broom-closet door with the Spellotaped sign that says "P. Weasley, Special Assistant to the Temporary Ad Hoc Committee on Dispensing." Well, _that_ is certainly obscure (and redundant), and it's more than obvious that Percy Weasley has fallen in the world.

She knocks, not sure if he would still be in at six o'clock.

"Come in, but mind the parchments," says a familiar voice.

It's good he warned her, because they tower over her head on either side of the door, and his tiny desk is flanked with them. The vibration of her entrance starts the two towers of documents on either side of the door tottering, and Percy gives a flick of his wand to steady them. Samson as bureaucrat, she quips to herself.

He levitates the stacks around to clear a pathway to the spindly wooden chair in front of the desk, then Transfigures the chair into a plump overstuffed armchair. "Make yourself comfortable," he says. "Can I be of help?"

She sits and presents her credentials from the War Crimes Commission, then says, "I'm looking for some documents from the diplomatic correspondence," she says. She puts down on his desk the parchments she has. "I seem to be missing the French text for the extradition orders sent to the French Ministry for Magic and the final draft of the orders sent to Central Europe."

Percy looks at the scrivener's copies she has given him. "No, these are final draft. You can request copies from the appropriate foreign Ministries to confirm."

"This order was sent to the French Ministry in English text only?"

Percy adjusts his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. "Yes, this is the final version—see the date? You'll want to confirm with Paris, but this is how it went out."

She frowns. "But you were in charge. You signed them, and I'm assuming you drafted them as well."

"That's correct."

"And the language in these extradition orders to Central Europe—well, it just doesn't look like final draft."

Percy looks at her. "These are the documents that went out. It seems you have a full set." He adds pedantically, "Of course, you know that with them the official version is the Latin text." He thumbs carefully through the stack for Central Europe and moves the Latin version to the top. "You'll want to refer to that one in any correspondence."

"Yes, well, but the language… it's not the way I would have written it if I wanted the extraditions to go through: 'we hereby demand in the name of the greater good…'"

He cuts her off. "That's the way it went out. Again, you can confirm with the appropriate Ministries. I take full responsibility for the final text." He runs a hand through his hair and sighs, looking tired. He's eyeing a stack of correspondence at his right elbow and clearly thinking about the next task at hand on his overcrowded desk.

"The extradition orders went out to Grindelwald country _demanding_ things in the name of the _greater good._ That just seems calculated to… stir up bad memories." Percy shrugs. Hermione wonders how explicitly to spell it out. There's something odd going on here. She knows that Voldemort came calling for Grindelwald in his cell at Nurmengard. He didn't go look up the local fifth column, because there wasn't one. Nor did the Death Eaters have much success trying to recruit foreign auxiliaries. Memories are long in that part of the world, and Grindelwald is not remembered fondly. So that language strikes her as conscious sabotage.

As does the arrogant, commanding tone.

As does the failure to address the French Ministry _in French,_ when the Central European correspondence was sent out in six languages in addition to Latin.

"Percy, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

He looks up from the work on his desk.

"When did you _really_ switch sides?"

***

When Hermione finally gets a day off, she isn't sure what day of the week it is. She's moved out of Grimmauld Place and is living in suburban London in her parents' house. Surprisingly, no one has disturbed it in the time she's been gone, and now she's reinforcing the defenses with the new tricks she's learned courtesy of her job with the war crimes commission. She's never going to see a knut of her earnings there, since it all goes toward compensating Gringotts. In revenge, she's compensating herself by using it as a study opportunity.

She's picked up some contract programming jobs to put some money in the bank in what she's thinking of as the 'real world.' (Though she has to be fair and say that when she's sitting at her laptop in her parents' kitchen, she thinks of the wizarding world as the 'real world'). _Reality is wherever I'm not._

Days off have been few and far between.

She takes the train into the city, and then finds herself getting off at the stop near Grimmauld Place. Sheer force of habit. She buys herself an overpriced coffee and a newspaper, but the ritual is not as comforting as it had been during her stay there. She feels a little creepy sitting in the square in front of Number 11 and Number 13. She doesn't belong there any more than she does at the Burrow. She bloody well doesn't belong in that world at all, except that she's bound to it for an indeterminate term… enslaved to the goblins. Like something out of Grimm's fairy tales, except this is real. Who knows, Grimm's fairy tales are probably real too. Their sheer bloodymindedness argues for their authenticity.

Remembers a mordant comment of her mother's about bureaucracy: _Kafka was writing documentation._

She wanders in circles, one Georgian square after another. Anyplace but here, she thinks. She wishes she'd planned this better; she could have scheduled a jaunt with Dean. Too late, though; Dean is quite as busy as she is these days, working on his portfolio for art school while she puts the finishing touches on his faked-up secondary school credentials. He's looking forward to leaving the wizarding world behind.

They went to the Tate several weeks back, her last day off, and spent four hours looking at the Turners. "Wizards have nothing like that," Dean said. "They have magic, but no imagination."

She's been pondering that remark ever since. Maybe he's right, or maybe they do have something like that but they just don't show it to outsiders. Not that she's had much of a view of traditional wizarding culture; the only wizarding home she's really visited is the Burrow, and she understands that Molly and Arthur sit at the shabby-genteel end of the scale for Purebloods. The Weasley children are mad for sport and practical jokes, except for Percy who's still something of an outcast. And Percy is a junior bureaucrat enamored of minutiae.

Not that it matters, because it's been very awkward ever since she moved out. She sits outside and talks to Dean, but she doesn't get invited inside. Mrs. Weasley regards her as a "mercenary scarlet woman," which makes no sense at all given (a) she and Ron had nothing like a sex life when they finally broke up, and in fact that was one of his grievances; (b) she's the one working two jobs while Ron and Harry kick back and play Quidditch; (c) Ron is the one whose expenses Harry is covering.

She knows that Harry has responsibility for Grimmauld Place, for Andromeda Tonks and Teddy Lupin; the Gringotts bill would have eaten all of his funds without any guarantee that the Ministry would come through after all… but she still feels betrayed.

It makes her tired just thinking about it.

***

Wandering the streets, surrounded by Muggles, she thinks about the wizards and witches she knows, and they're really all very ordinary people, aside from the magic. McGonnagall could be a headmistress in any Scottish boarding school. Put Boudicca Derwent in a white lab coat instead of robes, and she could be working for the National Health Service. Professor Sprout could just as well be a tousled and flighty professor of botany. Hermione follows the Muggle papers enough to recognize that the Ministers of Magic are politicians, and if you did a fashion makeover on Fudge or Scrimgeour or Shacklebolt they'd pass without remark at Ten Downing Street or the Houses of Parliament.

Well, there are some types that don't exactly translate: Dumbledore, Snape, Malfoy senior. But she has to be fair; she hasn't known a lot of spymasters or double agents or power brokers in her life as a Muggle. Not to talk to.

She stops in irritation at King's Cross Station. Mindless pacing, only this is outdoors, and she's wasting her day off. Where to go?

Out of ancient habit, she decides on Hogsmeade. No need for permission, after all, since she isn't a student any more. She'll Apparate discreetly to Hogsmeade and then hike up to Hogwarts and see how Neville is doing.

***

Hogsmeade is smaller and shabbier than she remembers, but the walk to Hogwarts cheers her up. The Aurors at the gates give her a quick once-over and let her through without question, and abruptly she remembers that in this world she's radically famous. She walks to the greenhouses, but he isn't there. Professor Sprout tells her that Neville is doing some errands. Try the library or the hospital wing, she suggests.

The library is empty, or rather, Neville isn't there.

At the hospital wing, Madam Pomfrey greets her and says Neville's expected in a bit, and would she care to go in. The space has been rearranged so there's a partition screening off the far end of the room. She's escorted to the partition and waved in, told to take a seat and Neville will be in shortly.

She goes in and comes face to face with Draco Malfoy.

Before she can excuse herself and back out again, he glares at her and says, "Come to gloat, Granger?"

Nasty sneer, as usual. And she's not in the mood for it on her day off.

"No, I'm here to meet Neville."

"So where's the Weasel? Are the rumors true?"

"You should mind your own business."

"I don't _have _any business of my own, thank you, so I'll mind yours. Price of fame, you know_--_is it him who's no good in bed or is it you? I can't decide which possibility is more delicious to contemplate."

"Shut up, Malfoy."

"Though I hear _another_ rumor it's not just about sex, but _money._ A nasty business to do with Gringotts…"

She folds her arms across her chest and glares. He smirks.

"… and you're for it because Saint Potter bailed out the Weasel but not you. And you actually have to _work_ for a living…"

She feels her face heat. "That wasn't in the _Prophet,_" she says.

"… and they've got you over at St. Mungo's and the Ministry picking through things that are none of _your_ business…"

She knows that taking the bait is going to lose her the game, but she can't stop herself. "So who told you that?"

"People talk. And I love to listen." He narrows his eyes. "Especially when it's one of our sainted heroes being taken down a peg. So you have to pay reparations. About time."

"Convenient for you to forget who saved your miserable neck. And you read the _Prophet,_ so you know at least one person you might thank for helping to get your parents out of Azkaban."

"I don't forget. And even if I did, none of you will let me. Your _good friend_ Potter was here on a charity visit just last week. Good works, you know. Visiting defeated enemies on indefinite house arrest. He looked at me as if"—his voice is edging up the scale—"as if I were some pitiful crushed thing that had the ill grace to be twitching yet." He lifts his chin and glares at her. His mouth is compressed into a thin line.

He finishes, "So next time, don't do me any favors. Because nothing makes me sicker than the thought of owing _anything_ to you."

She remembers to slow down her breathing, but she can feel something building in her chest, crackling like static electricity. She reminds herself that a lightning bolt is static electricity, too, and she doesn't know what form the wild magic will take this time—only that she needs to cut it off _now._ If he'd stop being so provocative, it would be easier to put aside thoughts of killing him.

She tries taking a conciliatory line.

"To be fair, this last time it was really Neville who stepped in. I only helped. And if it makes you feel any better, I didn't know it was you until he got you cleaned up."

"Yes, and I saw the look on your face when you recognized me." He pauses just long enough. She remembers it bodily, that terrifying flare of rage._ Please don't push any further. I really don't want this to happen again. _Only how do you say this to somebody who's never done anything but push?

Then he asks, "If you'd _known_ it was me, would you have stepped in?"

She looks at him. The tone is sneering and provocative, but it's a real question.

She takes a deep breath and considers her words. She hopes that she sounds calmer than she feels. "It wasn't right, what they were doing. So I suppose the answer is yes. I wouldn't have acted any differently if I'd known it was you." She pauses.

"We've been fighting since we were eleven years old. Your friends and mine. I don't even remember the beginning of it. I admit, I've thought that I wanted to see you suffer. But the fact is that when it finally happened, it made me sick." She continues, "You said once that you wanted to see me tortured and publicly humiliated, that it would be a laugh."

"When did I say that?"

"At the beginning of our fourth year. At the Quidditch World Cup, when they were tormenting those Muggles. You said I should keep my bushy head down if I didn't want the same. So I would have thought that you really enjoyed it when your aunt cast Cruciatus on me at the Manor. But I've been able to look at that memory in the Pensieve, and you didn't look as though you were enjoying it. You looked sick and appalled and terrified."

She takes a deep shuddering breath to calm herself.

He's staring at her, mouth open, frozen in the middle of a devastating comeback that he seems to have completely forgotten.

She concludes, "So let's stop pretending that we hate each other more than we actually do."

He seems to have remembered that his mouth is open, and closes it. The humor of the situation finally occurs to her; he looks puzzled and indignant, as if someone has abruptly changed the rules of a game that's been played for generations. He sits down on the single bed that's in this partitioned area. Relieved of the necessity of verbal combat, she looks around.

There's the bed, and a table, and several chairs. One of the chairs is occupied by a small stack of folded robes. Some books and parchments and a quill sit on the table. Apparently he's living here. She feels impolite but isn't sure what to do now.

"If you'd prefer, I can sit outside…" she says.

"Sit down, Granger," he replies, indicating one of the chairs. She sits. The awkward silence persists a little longer.

Finally she says, "Well, you asked. So, I'm working for the Ministry, and you're right that it's not entirely by my own choice. But the work is very interesting, and that makes up for it somewhat." She smiles. "And I know how you know that, too, so it was silly of me to ask."

He raises one eyebrow.

"You overheard them talking about it. And don't look so surprised. I was an only child in a house full of adults. I imagine you were as well. And I'm not here to gloat over you."

"Well, Potter certainly was."

"Malfoy, if you can't tell the two of us apart, then you have more wrong with your eyes than Harry does. But in case you've forgotten: he's the skinny one with the specs. I'm the one with the _bushy_ hair and the teeth. The _girl_ one." He suppresses a smile. "And don't tell me you don't know that, because you have had an unhealthy interest in my love life ever since fourth year. Although I figured at the time all that business with Rita was just politics."

At this point, Neville comes in, carrying a racing broom. "Hermione! What are you doing here?"

"I got a day off on short notice, and I thought I'd come up here to see how you were. I couldn't call ahead—the place I'm staying isn't on the Floo network, and there aren't any telephones at Hogwarts…"

Malfoy cuts in. "Longbottom, I told you _two_ brooms. The Comet 260 and the Nimbus 2001."

"You know I don't like to fly."

"What would you know about flying when all you've ever used is the school brooms? They're _rubbish._ And I was going to let you fly the 2001."

Neville hands him the broom and nods to Hermione. "Come on," he says. On the way out, she sees Neville nod to Madam Pomfrey and then to the two Aurors stationed in the corridor outside the hospital wing.

They walk outside into cloudy sunshine; when the wind gusts, she feels a little chilly. She dressed for London, not for Scotland. Malfoy walks ahead of them, carrying his racing broom and striding with quick impatient steps. The wind blows his fine pale hair about; his robes billow behind him. He seems to be restraining himself from breaking into a run.

Neville and Hermione settle themselves in the stands at the Quidditch pitch, in the same places they've sat for every game since their first year. Malfoy looks at them, narrows his eyes, then thinks better of whatever he was about to say. The broom tugs at his hand; he swings his leg over it and takes off, streaking straight up for about a hundred feet and then turning abruptly to swoop through the goal posts.

"I can't believe I heard him suggest you go flying," Hermione said.

"Oh, he's restless. I can't say I blame him. They haven't let him out of that room since the attack. Today's the first day that Madam Pomfrey was willing to let him go flying."

"Why don't they want him staying in the dorm?"

"They _say_ they're worried about his safety. I'm not sure. He thinks it's house arrest."

"So is this your official job, watching him?"

"No, I just kept visiting. No one else was. McGonagall asked me to help him out with things. And he's not so bad once you get used to him." A pause. "You handled him very well, actually."

"You heard?"

"I came in when he was screaming at you about Harry's visit. Mind you, he's right about Harry's attitude. Ron was smirking the whole time, but Harry looked—well, the way you would look at something that's dead but not quite. Just as he said—something crushed but still twitching. Neither of them would look him in the eye."

"What I see from the Ministry side is that they're getting ready to blame as much as they can on the Malfoys."

"What is it you're doing at the Ministry?"

"I'm cataloguing the Pensieve depositions. They're collecting memories from just about anyone that survived this." Neville nods. Apparently, he's received a visit. "Along with all kinds of records about properties, the Death Eater strongholds, correspondence, Ministry decrees, money records. There's some kind of ongoing tug-of-war with Gringotts, and the Ministry is paying the compensation on my behalf."

"Cataloguing? It seems they could have anyone do that."

"No, they want it all linked and searchable. So I'm building a magical analogue to a database. And there aren't many witches or wizards who know anything about that sort of work."

Neville considers this in silence.

She asks, "So what are you doing? Are you still looking after the war orphans?"

"Not exactly. The Heads of House are doing that, and I'm officially apprenticed to Professor Sprout now. Without my NEWTs, but she has every confidence in me, she says. And it's not clear how soon Hogwarts is going to re-open or how it's going to look when it does."

Silver-edged clouds pass overhead. Hermione and Neville lapse into silence, watching the figure in flight overhead, tracing arabesques of joy. If that motion were music it would be a song in full voice with a chorus of laughter. She shivers a little in the stiff breeze; Neville unclasps his cloak and drapes it over her shoulders. It's heavy wool, very traditional—his father's? she wonders briefly—and warm with his body heat. She closes her eyes and absorbs that heat gratefully. For the first time, she understands the phrase _animal contentment._ There's the lovely contrast of the refreshing breeze on her face and the warm cloak; there's the sunlight and shadow and Neville's solid, friendly presence next to her.

And magic. She's taken it very much for granted, thinking about how _ordinary_ magical folk are, and she remembers the common-room arguments about the relative merits of football, rugby and Quidditch. She's sat in these stands for the six years of her formal schooling, watching a magical contest played on brooms—_flying brooms—_and not thought more of it than any other sporting contest, which is to say that she's been cold, or bored, or absorbed in the action. Now, watching a single figure in flight, she's thinking: this is impossible, of course. People don't fly. Ordinary people don't fly. _And I'm not that graceful on a broom, except in my dreams. So if I leave the wizarding world, I wouldn't be giving up any particular pleasure by renouncing my broomstick._

On the other hand, she imagines that Malfoy would have a great deal of trouble adjusting to a world in which he wasn't allowed to fly. From what the Headmistress said, flying is all he has left of magic at the moment.

He comes tearing in low over the stands, robes flapping. She and Neville duck as he passes not two feet over their heads; he's laughing as he brings the broom to a stop over the grass of the pitch and dismounts with theatrical grace. She claps; Neville joins in. Then they look at each other abruptly, remembering who this is, and continue to clap anyway.

Shamelessly, he takes a bow, holds out the broomstick.

"I can't convince you to have a try?"

Neville is shaking his head. Malfoy makes eye contact with her, and repeats the offer, smiling. It's an uncomplicated smile and his face is pink from the wind and the exertion.

"You make it look easy," she replies. She has the momentary impulse to clamber down the stands and try it, and then the voice in her head reminds her: _this is my old enemy, whose file I was reading yesterday, in whose house I was tortured, whose face appears at the periphery in my recurring nightmare._ She shakes her head, remembering to smile.

"Next time, perhaps," he says.

***

**Author's notes: **My version of Percy's role in the Thicknesse Ministry was inspired by SnorkackCatcher's story "The Sleeper Awakes" (on fanfiction (dot) net) For a superb full-length treatment of this theme, see also Elyse3. _The Scarlet Pimpernel,_ available in a beautiful PDF on the RedHen site [redhen-publications (dot) com/AfterHogwarts (dot) html].


	12. Chapter 12

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – mid July 1998)**

A lovely day off but it's left a strange and disturbing aftertaste. I'm glad I followed my impulse to visit Neville, but the sheer oddness of it…

What was odd?

Well, there was the astonishment of saying something that made Draco Malfoy shut up. Not something I ever thought I would accomplish. Nor did I ever think he would offer to share his toys with us—me or Neville. Childish of me to put it that way, but that's how it seemed. On the other hand, nearly all of his friends—contemporaries—in his House are dead.

And… this is hard to write. The little shiver of attraction I felt toward Neville when he shared his cloak with me. He's not a chubby little boy any more. I actually looked at him. He's a little taller than Ron and much broader through the shoulders, solid and strong under the last of the puppy fat. His hair is thick and shaggy and he's wearing it tied back, Pureblood style.

All right. I wrote before that I walked around in the Pensieve memories. People I know and people I don't. Harry's and Ron's memories aren't so strange; they line up well with mine—except for the part where I see point-of-view Voldemort, through Harry's eyes. That part gives me the shivers.

Pensieve memories are strange; you walk around inside them, but there's no emotion attached. Which makes it doubly strange to revisit the scene of my own torture.

This is not a good job for me to have. My nightmares have multiplied.

They want me to catalogue those memories with certain indices in mind. So now I'm formally assigned to go through them. Especially the ones from the important witnesses.

Harry. Ron. Neville. The posthumous depositions from Dumbledore and Snape. Luna and Dean and Mr. Ollivander. The Weasleys. People I know. Or knew. Or thought I knew. People I didn't know at all.

Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. Draco. The Ministry is _very_ interested in the Malfoys. And I walk through those memories and relive things I don't even want to know about, watch this family live as hostages in their own house for two years. Draco used to taunt us with his father's power but I don't think either he or his father understood what the so-called Dark Lord was about. Was there any point at which they could have chosen otherwise? Was there a point at which they could have turned back?

Everything I did in this war, I chose freely, even enthusiastically. Draco acted under duress. And when I put myself in his place, I'm not sure I would have acted differently. What would I have been willing to do if my mother's life depended on it?

I sent my parents to Australia so that no harm would befall them. Draco watched his father being tortured and humiliated in his own house—by his aunt as well as by Voldemort. I would have said before: _I can't imagine that._ Except now I can, and I have, and I am dreaming other people's nightmares every night.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – July 1998; includes laboratory notes)**

I'm not sure that this habit of writing things down is going to save my soul or my sanity but at least once I have written it down I am very clear that I cannot have seen Bellatrix Lestrange stalking around central London in broad daylight, because sod it, she's dead.

Although that didn't stop Voldemort. Oh shut up. Voldemort wasn't dead on round one; he was out of circulation. Disappeared. Disappeared is _not_ the same as dead. Any dictionary will tell you that.

Dead is dead but dead is not done. The War Crimes Commission wants to know what was going on at Death Eater central in the last stages of the war, and most of the people who'd have something useful to say about that are dead.

Necromancy would be awfully helpful for getting testimony from the dead, but unfortunately it is universally banned. They don't even teach the theory at Hogwarts. They do study necromancy at Durmstrang, though Viktor assured me that there is no lab. And he wouldn't joke about a thing like that because of what happened to his family under Grindelwald, who was mucking about with necromancy, along with his pureblood supremacy mania—claiming, in fact, that necromancy was part of Our Noble Magical Heritage. That's one of many reasons that Rita Skeeter, among others, had questions about why it took Dumbledore so long to be recruited into the effort to put him down. Grindelwald was _seriously fucking scary,_ as Ron puts it. Just like Tom Riddle, another of those pretty young fellows with bright ideas.

So we have to make do with Pensieve depositions from the survivors, and even the most tangential observations from very minor players are of interest. The Pensieve is maddening because you get the sensory track but _not_ the inside-the-head track and not the emotional track. That's by design. The Pensieve, as its name implies, was originally designed as an aid to the dispassionate examination of one's own memories: nonattachment in a bowl, so to speak. Removing the emotion and the chatter in the head is _key_ to that.

On the other hand, the emotion and the chatter in the head are precisely what come into play in the moments when people are making decisions, such as whether to let someone live or die. For a very personal example: I've replayed the scene where we were dragged to Malfoy Manor, where Lucius and Narcissa are egging on Draco to identify us, and he's mumbling and looking away and generally foot-dragging. I can tell by the weird _slowness_ of some of his reactions that he's madly thinking about what to do, but I don't know what calculations he's running inside his head.

Does it matter? As one present on the scene, what mattered to me was what happened. But if I'm deciding how to sentence Draco, it makes a big difference if he was terrified for his parents' lives or if he was a cold-hearted psycho who was only worried about being on the losing side.

***

I asked Boudicca Derwent, okay, why don't we just pour Veritaserum down their throats and question them? She said that it's a blunt tool, and the finer the subject's apprehension of language, the easier it is to lie. The interrogator must ask the right question in the right language for the things that really matter—and ultimately that means understanding the person you're questioning.

She told me that she had gotten more truth out of people with talking than with Veritaserum. As an expert on spell damage related to Cruciatus and Imperius, she adds that even the Unforgivables are overrated in this department. But lazy people can't resist blunt tools.

Lazy people. Stupid people. (Crabbe and Goyle come to mind.) They love blunt tools. And vicious people like them even more. Bellatrix didn't use Cruciatus because it was a good tool but because it was fun. And I don't even want to think about the things I've seen them do with Imperius. For entertainment, of an evening, when the boss was relaxing after a hard day of Evil Overlording. Not pretty. I have three tracks from living witnesses: Lucius, Narcissa, and Draco. Where they coincide, frequently I have no visual track from Draco, because Narcissa has her hands clamped over his eyes.

But he could still hear the screaming as they walked into the fire against their own will…

No. That's straightforward. I can guess how he felt about that because I also have the track of Bellatrix jeering at him as he doubles over to be sick. I can't know if Draco had aspirations to evil, but he didn't have the nervous system for it.

I have a lot of tracks of Bellatrix jeering at someone. Particularly when she's torturing them. Particularly when she had a grudge against her victim.

She had it in for Lucius for pretending he'd had nothing to do with the whole Voldemort business while she rotted in Azkaban for fourteen years. She went into that in considerable detail while she cast Crucio on him over and over again. With variations: there's letting the victim batter himself bloody against a stone wall; there's pushing it to loss of control of body functions; there's skin-to-skin contact between torturer and victim; there's Crucio plus Legilimens if you're into the multimedia experience, which she apparently was. She had a _lot _of fun with Lucius, and given that inflicting pain was a sexual thing with her, we can probably count it as adultery into the bargain. Especially since she did most of it in front of Narcissa. With Voldemort looking on, because the one thing he liked more than torture was the fun of delegating it.

Because if he _hadn't_ been looking on, Narcissa would never have let her get away with it.

I notice that Bellatrix never attacked Narcissa herself. And she never touched Draco, because to do that she would have had to contend with Narcissa. And apparently nobody, not even Fenrir Greyback, quite wanted to take on Narcissa. Well, there was Voldemort. But then he had her in check because he had Lucius and Draco as bargaining chips. From all that I can tell, Narcissa was a devoted wife and mother, as well as one of the more formidable witches of the age. Anybody that gives Bellatrix Lestrange second thoughts is not to be trifled with.

And let's talk about Fenrir Greyback for a minute. I once heard Draco describe him as his father's "family friend," but that was as far from truth as I've ever heard. Not unless your family friends make a habit of licking their lips and talking about the pleasures of the flesh while looking at your only son.

And yes, when I was wondering if he meant fangs or rape, he meant both. His pleasures of the flesh…

I do not want to talk about this. I still have the full sensory track of the stink of blood and sweat, and the scratchy raspy nasty voice talking about the order in which he enjoyed dismembering his living victim as he violated him. (Or her, but in front of Draco he talked about little boys.) How Narcissa could be proud to have birthed a child with the kind of lovely pale skin that his claws would go through like a razor through silk… He always addressed those monologues to Narcissa, while leering at Draco. With Voldemort looking on—without which witness Greyback wouldn't have dared to say boo to Narcissa.

What a nasty tangle of blackmail. Lucius, I think, was the one who brought Greyback into it. As a tool, I imagine, but the tool turned in his hand.

But I digress.

"Some considerations on magical technology, the mind-body problem, and questions of moral agency."

All right, let's think about it as notes for a research paper.

The Pensieve leaves out emotion and interior monologue—what we think of as thoughts. So what other devices do we have to hand? Veritaserum is a blunt instrument, and torture is ruled out. The interrogator has to understand the subject…

… well, could you _be_ the subject? How about Polyjuice?

I've been wondering about this one for some time. When I impersonated Harry last summer, I remember being really intimidated at the idea of flying under combat conditions, but once I was actually up there, I wasn't anywhere near as clumsy as I'd expected I would be, or as scared—_except when I thought about it consciously._

Aha. So the _mind_ was me and the _body _was Harry. With all of Harry's reflexes. Harry's peripheral nervous system, so to speak… and whatever trace of Harry's mind lives there. The _physical part _of the mind, the part that resides in the body…

Wizards don't do statistics, but I just started wondering about the incidence of recreational Polyjuice use. Wouldn't it be great fun to play Quidditch while being Harry Potter?

Actually, that could be _serious _fun.

But it's not fun I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about running these Pensieve tracks while Polyjuiced as the donor. See if I get any more information that way.

And I have a hair sample from Draco already. And a whole pile of Pensieve memories. No, I don't think this is going to be recreational Polyjuice use. I think it's going to be a visit to hell. As if I didn't already have a season ticket.

***

_Aguamenti! Aguamenti!_

I almost drowned because I was dreaming about the fire in the Room of Requirement. I must have done the spell wandlessly, because I woke up under a cascade of water and then grabbed my wand and started shouting the incantation, which brought on yet more water.

In the dream, I was scaling that rickety swaying tower of furniture, feeling it give way under my feet, feeling with my feet for the next secure hold, while the fiery beasts roared around us. And I was constantly scanning for the next more-or-less horizontal place to which to haul Goyle's unconscious body, while intoning in a dead voice, over and over, something to the effect of "Crabbe, you fucking idiot." My cursing was a drone like a mantra and it helped to shut out some of the stark terror and it definitely helped with the raw heave-ho effort needed to haul an unconscious body half again as heavy as my own.

Goyle's face looked softer in the dream than I've ever seen it in life. No wonder. It was the face of a friend. I don't know the details of their relationship, but when I'm Polyjuiced into Draco, the bodily reaction to Goyle is a kind of softening and relaxing. Goyle made Draco feel safe.

And then there was the heartbreaking moment when Harry stretched out his hand to pull me upward to safety, but our palms slid apart from the sweat and I wouldn't let go of Goyle.

That, by the way, was the moment when I woke up, all survival impulses on high alert with the conviction that I was about to die.

Conclusion: The Polyjuice-and-Pensieve combination has some interesting possibilities, though it still requires a skilled observer. It is optimal that the observer not have post-traumatic stress at baseline, so that subjects' PTSD can be accurately assessed. However, for our initial investigations, beggars can't be choosers. Further research is indicated.

***

Baseline. So what is Draco like when he's not in hell?

Up until now I've been Polyjuicing myself and then going straight into the Pensieve.

Well, I was _curious._ I asked Crookshanks the question but he just wound around my ankles and purred.

And I do have the home Potions bench. No reason I can't answer this one in the comfort of my own home.

That is, my parents' home.

By means of the Potions bench stocked with the necessaries I begged, borrowed, or (frankly) nicked from general supplies. Slughorn is a little more careful after Draco made off with the demo batch of Polyjuice back in sixth year, but Draco, as a covert operative, was _crude_ and I am not. Though to be fair, I don't have Voldemort breathing down my neck.

I nick the ingredients rather than the finished product. And I'm careful to cover my tracks. And anyway this is on Ministry business and the Ministry has done me no favors so if I make off with the odd paperclip or shred of Boomslang skin, it's occult restitution. To put it plainly: they owe me compensation and I am saving them the trouble of paying it.

And when I set up the initial batch for the first round of Pensieve experiments a month ago, I made it in quantity. I am set for Polyjuice for the foreseeable future.

Saturday night, nothing better to do, so let's pour off a nice tumbler of Polyjuice, drop in one of those hairs from the files, and see what happens.

***

Observations from round one:

For future: Lock Crookshanks in another room before I do any more Polyjuice experiments. He does not like Draco. More likely, he's offended by the abrupt replacement of my smell with something unfamiliar and male. He clawed Draco's shins. Unfortunately, an hour later they were my shins.

At the time the hairs were harvested (that would have been second week of May) the subject was underweight by approximately 10 kg for his height and build. I took off my clothes and weighed myself on the bathroom scale, measured his height and looked it up in the height/weight charts my mother had taped to the wall. He weighs less than I do and he's four or five inches taller. I had no idea he was so severely thin; the robes hide a lot.

I couldn't sit still. I paced. I twisted notepaper into odd shapes. I tapped my feet. I felt as if I'd drunk two or three cups of really strong coffee. This is definitely not my nervous system. And I'm not taking it out in public because I'm not sure how I might be tempted to behave. Well, yes, and there's the problem of being mistaken for an escaped Person of Interest.

That annoying drawl is real. I stood in front of the mirror and talked and all of my words came out in the bored-affected-patrician dialect that I have sworn he was putting on. _But he really talks like that._ His voice is a lot more resonant, and less annoying, from inside his head than outside.

Oh yes, and talking in front of the mirror felt in character, somehow.

There's an all but invisible tracery of scars on his face—I think that's from the falling chandelier when we made our escape from the Manor. You can only see it in strong raking light. I never noticed it before. Narcissa does nice work with healing spells. She could have been a professional.

Hard to tell in the light I had, but I think the repairs run over the eyes. He took a face full of broken glass and can still see. More points to Narcissa. She really should have been a Healer instead of marrying a high-society Death Eater.

I took off my shirt and looked for the Sectumsempra scars. Couldn't find them. Snape did impressive work. Boudicca Derwent tells me that they can reverse Sectumsempra now, but the victims almost always end up with extensive scarring, in some cases comparable to werewolf scars. Draco is one lucky boy. If not for Snape's work, he'd look like Bill Weasley now.

Of course, Draco is indirectly the reason Bill got those scars… (see "letting the Death Eaters into Hogwarts," cool hack with disastrous results since somebody invited Greyback.)

…and it's Snape's fault in the first place for putting that spell into circulation. Well, and Harry, too, I suppose, for giving it a new cachet with the rising generation.

And for completeness of the record:

Yes, I can now say I've read his file and I've seen him naked. (That sounds _really_ creepy. And there's a part of me that enjoys the creepiness of it. But that's not for inclusion in the lab notes. Not remotely.)

***

Draco's eyesight is better than hers, and that considering she doesn't wear spectacles. And the reflexes are amazing.

She remembered her cousin from Boston trying to teach her how to juggle when she was nine and Rebecca was ten. Rebecca kept saying in her sharp American accent, "Don't _think _about it!" as the balls crashed to the floor again and again.

Now she tries those moves that defeated her then and _still_ defeat her.

He doesn't think about it. He just catches the balls as they fall.

This is interesting. This is _very_ interesting.

She turns on the radio and tries to keep her own mind out of it and follow the music. It's like swimming, breasting the waves. She catches a glimpse of him (_it's him, not me_) dancing in the mirror.

This is not remotely her nervous system. When her conscious brain gets out of the way, amazing things happen in this borrowed body.

The midnight hour comes all too soon, and she's back to herself. She scribbles down her notes and then sits staring at herself: bare-breasted girl with a mane of brown hair and unexceptional bone structure, wearing ratty jeans. No scars, except for the zigzag that crosses her ribs and belly, from the battle in the Department of Mysteries—and the raw sting of the scratches Crookshanks left on her naked shins as she stood on the bathroom scale. She picks up her wand, does one flick to clean and a second to heal the wounds.

She stares at herself, except it's not really the self who set out on the journey.

She's been wearing another skin. All these years she thought of Polyjuice as a tool of espionage, and it's so much more than that. It's another set of responses. Conscious mind can override it and usually does, but if you sit still, the borrowed body tells you things you never knew in your own skin. She was never good at juggling or dancing, though she tried. He's good at them without effort.

What did she borrow?

A finely tuned, delicate organization. Very sensitive, like a seismograph. Restless, roving; itchy-annoyed if it has to sit still or quiet. Irresistibly drawn to performance.

Very poor material for an assassin or a soldier; excellent for an athlete or an artist.

She remembers the conversation she had with Neville and how easily she could imagine Neville as a field biologist and herself as a mathematician.

What would Draco have been if he hadn't gotten his Hogwarts letter?

He was always clowning, doing his cruelly accurate impressions. He was a mean little boy but his jokes were least as funny as some of the juvenile humor she's seen on the telly. So a comedian, maybe, or a dancer, or an actor. Or maybe he would have been an athlete; with that light frame of his, a gymnast or a runner. Or (thinking about how she _still_ can't get "Weasley is our King" out of her brain some days) one of the people who writes those advertising jingles that behave like brain viruses.

No, he wouldn't have been. He wouldn't have been any of that. He would have been dead, if Neville was right. Dead, as surely as Neville himself would been dead, if the child his uncle had dropped out the window had been a Squib.

A Squib, and some families disappear their Squibs. Draco might have been a little unmarked grave out behind the Manor. If they disappear the Squibs, they probably re-use the names, too. Maybe Narcissa was so solicitous of him because she'd already borne a couple of "mistakes." Maybe at least one little boy that she also named Draco, so every time she calls him she reminds herself of the one who didn't make the cut. Lucius might have been snarking about the numerous Weasley children because he was _jealous._ And if that's so, probably _angry_ as well, that Narcissa had to suffer where Molly didn't.

Crookshanks scratches at the door, and she stands to let him in. He gives her a speaking look and then a deep _mrow,_ and she sits down cross-legged on the cold tile floor to let him climb in her lap and be scratched behind the ears and to nestle warmly against her bare chest. He rubs his jowl against her forearm and hand, turns in the warm circle of her crossed legs and does the same on the other side. Some trace of an alien scent must remain there, that he's eager to overwrite. Then he butts her palm with his head, to remind her of the extensive penance remaining for her late transgression, and his generosity in letting her make it up.

***

**Author's notes:**

"Dead is dead but dead is not done." (Gertrude Stein, _The Making of Americans_).

Occult restitution is related to the medieval notion of the just price or just wage; I was introduced to it by the American essayist Carol Bly in _Letters from the Country. _

Cousin Rebecca: from A.J. Hall again (_Lust over Pendle, Dissipation and Despair_). She grew up to be even more annoying.


	13. Chapter 13

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(Third week of July)**

I woke from a nightmare—not even _my_ nightmare—and set the curtains on fire. Wandless _Incendio. _ Got it put out quickly enough, but this is scaring me.

Fell asleep again, mercifully. For the first time in years had the broomstick-racing dream. With the lover. With a face I won't name. I know why, too. It's that last weekend at Hogwarts.

Visiting Neville turns out to mean visiting Malfoy. Neville is his semi-official escort. Malfoy wheedled another visit to the Quidditch pitch, this time on toward evening. The students were at dinner in the Great Hall. Neville sat in the Gryffindor stands and demurred once more the offer of flying.

Feeling adventurous, I agreed and then Malfoy laughed at my handling of the Nimbus 2001. Said it was a disgrace to have a broom like that and spend all your energy pulling back on it to _keep _from flying.

_Pointy-faced git._ I didn't say that, though I did lose my temper. My fuse is a lot shorter these days.

I told him I was doing this as a favor to Neville, and I'd already had enough trouble from him and his. I told him that he could take his broom back, thank you very much. (I handed it back to him. I restrained myself from hurling it at him.) And I was so sorry that I hadn't had the benefit of private lessons, so he'd just have to wait until someone sufficiently aristocratic showed up.

I was turning to go back to the stands when he said, "Wait!" I turned around and he was holding the two brooms and staring at me with a stricken expression.

"Well?" I said. Not that I was expecting an apology.

"Tell me what to do," he said.

_Try impersonating a human being. _ I said: "If you're so clever, why don't you teach me how to do it right? Make me like it."

To my great surprise, he did.

A witch's broom is a specialized wand that channels the intent to fly. We stood in the middle of the pitch for at least an hour just summoning the broom. That's it. Will yourself to fly and summon the means. Really want to fly. Practice flying successively higher and higher, straight up, then come down.

Then he said: "Try this," and mounted his broom and told me to sit behind, and he very carefully placed my hands, not on the broom but on his waist, one on each side, just below the ribcage, little finger grazing the crest of the hip. As if we were going to dance.

I looked up to the stands to be sure that Neville was watching, and that he would not let me fall. After all, I was doing this to spare him Malfoy's nagging. He met my eyes and nodded. He was sitting with his wand out, very casually across his lap but ready. And at least one Auror in sight was doing the same.

I thought about the physics of the situation, how I was following the fixed points of the hip crests and the rib cage, to learn how to adjust my center of mass in flight. _It's a body you're touching. It does not have a name. Think of it as a schematic._

Then Malfoy flew a very slow circuit of the pitch, not five feet off the ground. And I don't know how to say this except that I was sharing his intent. I could feel how he flew, and I wasn't afraid of falling.

Then I flew solo and it was amazing.

"Better," he said.

And we flew tandem again.

He's bloody persistent. We drilled that over and over until it was dark and I was navigating by the light of Neville's wand.

On the last pass, something happened. Nothing really, except that intent shifted. Mine or his, I don't know. By then I was feeling quite confident and I was touching his waist only with fingertips—and suddenly my fingertips knew that they were touching bare skin through the robes. And I could feel silky hair tickling my face as we flew, and heat radiating from his skin to my fingertips.

_Under our clothes we're all naked._ When I was ten, I thought that was uproariously funny. Now I found it terrifying. _This is my enemy, whose file I have been reading._

When we landed, our feet touched ground and then he took the broom in one hand and he stood utterly still. Waiting. I didn't take my hands away. I moved them, ever so slightly, still touching, bringing the cloth of his robe with it—feeling the skin with my fingertips, through the cloth. I heard his breath hitch, in the darkness.

I thought: _Pureblood high style. Nothing under those robes. Dead sexy._

I dropped my hands.

He said, "So, Granger, you utter perv, is it flying you like or is it me?"

I said, "Malfoy, this surprises me no end, but it's both, actually." This sounded far too flirtatious, even to my ears. Maybe it was the way he'd posed the question in the first place. To clarify, I added, "I would never have suspected you of patience. Still less of having any desire to teach." I didn't say: _But I suppose loneliness will drive one to desperate ends._

"Then you wouldn't find it intolerable to fly with me again?" I almost felt sorry for him, until he added, "You're far less inept than Longbottom. Some days I can't believe he's a pureblood wizard. But with some work, _you_ could pass for a proper witch." He adds, "Mud—I mean muggle-born or not."

_Ah yes, the Malfoy we know and loathe. Although I could swear I just heard something that sounded like an ungracious retraction of his father's party line._

"I'll take you up on your offer," I said, "if you promise not to nag Neville to fly."

"Next week, then," he said.

***

None of this is going into the lab notes.

Hermione arrives at Hogwarts on Friday afternoon after a particularly frustrating series of meetings in London with the banking client, who have no idea what they want but are willing to spend three hours rearranging what's already been done. And every word out of their mouths is five to six hours' work for her, minimum.

She meets with McGonagall to review her time-turner use for the week. The Headmistress asks her pointed questions about hours of sleep to hours of work. She will concede that she isn't doing as well on the sleep as might be optimal, but after all she's eighteen-going-on-nineteen and has lots of reserves. Having all that extra time available is just too tempting. There's reading to catch up on, there are programming problems she can spend an extra hour or two tweaking, there's second and third passes through the Pensieve depositions. Compared to that, sleep just isn't that attractive, and after all, isn't she still a student, sort of? She can't be expected to cut back on her _reading_ time.

McGonagall tells her that if she doesn't see an increase in the sleep-to-work ratio, she will revoke the time-turner.

Hermione walks out of that meeting in a distinctly surly mood. She goes to her little cubbyhole of a room to do some reading before dinner. Professor Vector loaned her a fourteenth-century treatise on Arithmancy from her private collection, and Hermione wants to finish it and do some note-taking before they meet on Monday at the Ministry. That's a nice relief, but dinner comes all too soon and she's just in the middle of the good part when she has to break off. Remembering her tete-a-tete with the Headmistress, she resists the urge to give the time-turner a couple of flips to buy herself the time to do just a little bit more. That won't be one stolen hour, but more like four.

Anyway, she realizes she's hungry. Neville knocks on the door and she unlocks it, which pretty much does away with the temptation to use the time-turner. And he's in a very good mood; things are going well in the greenhouses and he is telling her about the students' progress with repotting mandrakes. It's very relaxing to listen to someone else's day at work, since she'd rather forget hers.

They sit down with the students, and eat quietly while the children talk. The house tables are all jumbled up now; the children wear scarves with their House colors, but nobody's really sitting by House affiliation. Neville sits at a different table each night, to circulate. He's not a teacher, so he's not at the high table, but he's not a student either. The Slytherin table stands empty; the children avoid it as if it were cursed, so everyone's crowded into the remaining three tables.

She's thinking about the treatise waiting for her in her room, when Neville takes the wrong turn in the apprentices' corridor. "Just to check," he says, which turns out to mean a visit with Draco. Some time in the last week he's been moved from the hospital wing to a tiny room next to Neville's relatively roomier accommodations. When she and Neville enter, Draco has already finished his evening meal and is reclining on the bed, reading a Potions textbook. He's listlessly turning pages, and he closes the book without marking his place as soon as Neville puts his head in.

She's looking for an inconspicuous place to sit and meditate quietly on the theorems she was learning before dinner, when Draco asks her, "So, Granger, how was practice?"

She's puzzled. "What practice?"

Flying practice, of course. She'd forgotten about the pretense of flying lessons. She'd been humoring him, or rather doing Neville a favor, but apparently Draco is taking this quite seriously as a weekly appointment.

She was busy, and besides she doesn't have a broom. That she can find, anyway. To tell the truth, she didn't look, because honestly she can't remember if she even owns one. She vaguely remembers a conversation with her parents at the beginning of her second year about what model she wanted, as her father looked at the latest brooms in the Quidditch shop. She'd told him not to waste money on something fancy because she wasn't sure she was going to use a broom that much, and she was _quite_ sure that she wasn't going to be playing Quidditch.

And anyway, she's been busy all week. She's going to add, "Too busy to practice," and thinks better of it when she sees him glowering. Those pale eyes of his are perfectly suited to it.

He drawls, "Granger, it's a complete waste of time to tutor you if you're not going to practice."

She says, "I don't have a broom." She's going to add something about the dubious possibilities of flying in densely populated muggle districts, but he's staring at her. Open-mouthed. He's too astonished to sneer; plainly this has exceeded anything he expected from her.

"You don't have a _broom?_" This with a complex and scathing brew of incredulity, contempt, and sardonic amusement.

He gets up off the bed, goes to the corner where his two brooms are standing, takes one, walks straight up to her and shoves the handle into her hand.

She pushes it back at him. "I can't take this."

He wraps her fingers around the handle. "Yes, you can. You don't have a broom. This is a broom." Quite right, this is a broom. A Nimbus 2001, in fact. The very model his father bought for the entire Slytherin Quidditch team.

"But it's yours."

"Yes, on loan to you, Granger. You don't have a broom. I have two. Do the arithmetic. Now you don't have the excuse of no broom, so I don't want to hear it next week."

This is probably improper. She's pretty sure it's improper, in fact; it ought to be documented and if it were documented it wouldn't look good. "Ministry employee accepts loan of expensive racing broom from suspected war criminal." No, doesn't sound good at all.

He looks at her. "Seven a.m. on the Quidditch pitch."

Well, that's a record: _three _unsatisfactory meetings in one day (not counting the usual nonsense at the Ministry), and she's in trouble for not doing her flying homework. In trouble, mind you, with someone who's likely facing a stint in Azkaban.

***

Just as last week, they fly drills for an hour and a half, and then, by way of a break, Draco tells her he's going to show her what a _real_ flyer can do. He spends half an hour doing what she can only think of as exhibition flying, because she sees no earthly reason for some of the fancier maneuvers. Except, of course, that they give him a chance to show off and no doubt he's restless after sitting indoors most of the week.

She isn't sure what he _does,_ exactly. Neville is clearly busy teaching, but Draco doesn't have any assigned duties. He isn't a student any more; he seems to be spending part of his time reading. The pretense appears to be that he's revising for NEWTs, but no one knows when they'll be held again. It's house arrest, of course, and not particularly well disguised as anything else.

He's flying in very low over the lake, skimming the surface, turning, and he must have caught his foot on something just below the water, because suddenly he does a very unchoreographed tumble. He lands in the shallows with a splash, still holding the broom, and clambers out covered in mud from the waist down. His robes are sticking to his legs and Hermione finds herself twitching in sympathetic discomfort—clammy slimy stuff sticking to him and _cold_ besides.

As he stands there holding his clothes out from his body, she realizes he didn't reach for his wand to fix this—no, because she's not even clear that he's carrying it. Remembers what McGonagall said. He can't reliably cast ordinary spells.

And she knows that if she were him, she'd be uncomfortable—well, she _has_ been him, and she has an idea of how uncomfortable he is right now. She pulls her wand out of her pocket and does a quick _Scourgify_ and follows up with a warming charm_._ He looks up, relief and suspicion in his expression.

"You didn't have your wand, and you looked really uncomfortable," she says, as nonchalantly as she can, and pockets her wand.

***

Because of her misgivings about the loan of Draco's broom, she tells McGonagall about it and asks if the broom should be checked for hexes. McGonagall agrees that this would be prudent, and tells her she should be able to pick it up in a few days. She doesn't see a problem with the loan; in fact, she confesses herself pleasantly surprised that Hermione is willing to help Neville to keep Draco occupied.

Hermione spends Sunday finishing the Arithmancy treatise and taking notes for the design meeting at the Ministry on Monday. Tuesday night after she gets home from work at the Ministry, the broom has been checked out.

And now she has to do her flying practice. Wednesday morning at dawn she's on the Quidditch pitch, flying drills over and over. It's exhilarating, being in the air, and she hates to agree with stupid Malfoy, but it really does make her feel like a _proper witch_—wind tearing through her hair and plastering her clothes against her body—and when she thinks about crossing back over she knows that she'll miss this, even though she's not very good at it.

_Not yet,_ adds the stubborn part of her.

She hikes to the gates, Apparates to her parents' house and goes upstairs to start her day's programming with her blood still buzzing from her exertions. Finishes her programming for the day earlier than expected, looks at the time-turner, gives it two discreet flips, pulls on a jumper and an anorak over that, takes the broom, and Apparates to a lonely spot on the Scottish coast. Spends an hour or two flying, remembering that dream from when she was fourteen. At the time, that dream was probably about Viktor and the thrill of sexual awakening, but now it's about flying.

Thursday morning she wakes up with a brilliant idea.

Brilliant of the crazy-but-brilliant variety. Recreational Polyjuice. Playing Quidditch while being Harry Potter. Or rather, doing her flying drills while being Draco Malfoy, and seeing what she learns. This isn't work-related, but she rationalizes that she'll learn something that might be of use later.

She eats breakfast, pulls on warm clothes, grabs a flask and pours in the Polyjuice and the hair, screws it closed. Remembers who she'll be when she's done, and pulls a dark knitted watch cap over her hair. The last thing she wants is to be arrested as an escaped Person of Interest, because she isn't clear that the Aurors have orders to take such persons alive.

Apparates to the coast with her borrowed broom, downs the Polyjuice, checks that everything's in order (in particular that her now-distinctive hair is carefully tucked under the knitted cap), and takes off over the choppy water. Not thinking. Very carefully not thinking except with her body.

It's over far too soon, but then she takes another hour repeating the experience as herself, to see if she can get it engraved on her own nervous system.

Apparates back home, decides it was definitely not work-related, takes a hot shower and dresses for work at the Ministry. Calculates the necessary number of turns, turns back three hours, Apparates to Diagon Alley just outside the Leaky Cauldron, and steps through their Floo to the Ministry. At midday, she Floos to St. Mungo's with the lab notebook from her Polyjuice-and-Pensieve experiments and meets with Boudicca Derwent to brief her and turn over a copy of the notes. Derwent finds her observations interesting, and files them.

She asks if there have been any unusual symptoms since beginning the experiments.

"Well, none, really," Hermione says, "except I'm having more intense dreams about what I saw in the subject's Pensieve depositions." She doesn't add, "and more sympathy for his twitchy-ferret ways." That wouldn't sound very professional, nor would her observation that at least half of her annoyance with Draco's mannerisms (as opposed to his ideas or his actions) was her notion that he was doing it to be irritating, and not because he was just like that.

She goes back to the Ministry, finishes her work there, Floos to the Leaky Cauldron, dodges one of Rita's photographers and remembers why she doesn't usually take this route home, Apparates to her parents' house, goes upstairs, changes her clothes, turns the time-turner back eight hours, and goes to yet another design meeting in central London with the banking client. When that's finished, she discreetly Apparates home (from the loo in a café up the street from the bank), grabs a quick snack, and sits herself down with the laptop for four hours of programming. Then she eats a quick dinner, pours off a flask of Polyjuice by way of dessert, turns back the time-turner to grab another three hours of daylight, takes the broom and Apparates to the coast.

Life just doesn't get any better than this. Now she _gets_ it about flying. This is strictly better than sex. No, she has to be fair. Better than the sex that she's had. And now she's going to be comparing any sex in future to flying, which can't possibly be a fair comparison.

She feels sorry for Draco that he hasn't had a better time in his own skin, because she is having the time of her life in it. She's never going to have reflexes like his because she just isn't wired like that, but at least she knows what it feels like, and she's picking up the knack of relaxing in the right places.

She Apparates home, narrowly dodges past herself leaving, runs upstairs, takes a long hot shower, turns back the time-turner four hours and sets her alarm clock for the next morning. Twelve hours of sleep. That should keep McGonagall happy.

***

Saturday morning, Draco approves her progress. No, scratch that. He's absolutely gobsmacked at how well she flies, and struggling not to show it.

She tries to keep a straight face as she says, "I tried to do it just the way that you would."

He looks at her suspiciously, narrows his eyes, finally manages: "Well, Granger, just keep practicing. I don't want to see you getting lazy."

_No chance of that,_ she thinks. And smirks at him because she knows it will drive him crazy.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(Last week of July 1998)**

It was a bookshop, not at all where I needed to look, but it drew me in.

There's a peculiar magic having to do with books, with libraries and bookshops. I travel along its field lines like a bead on a wire. Like a trained rat in a maze, I can sniff out what I seek and find a path to it—so long as it's knowledge, so long as it's in books …

Or now, I discover, lines of code. But those are like books too; they're made of words built into idea-castles. And it must be a universal magic, because my programming colleagues, who are the most Mugglish of Muggles, notice it. Funny thing how they put it, too. They call me a wizard. Wrong gender, dears, but otherwise you have it right.

So today I was abroad in London with money in my pocket and a birthday present to buy. I went from one shop to another, more or less randomly, because here is the place where I can spend money and on the other side of the gateway at the Leaky Cauldron my money disappears. At the end of four hours I was footsore and discouraged and I knew for certain that there is nothing in _this_ world that Harry wants. He's left it behind.

I have the invitation in my pocket, stiff parchment with the seal of the Ministry for Magic on it. Last year it was a casual invitation from Molly. This year I have to go to the Ministry on the designated day to pick up the Portkey that will take me to Stoat's Head Hill. The arrivals are staggered and the delegations of guests will be escorted to the Burrow by Aurors.

Harry is my oldest friend in that world, but he's also the savior of the wizarding world, the Boy Who Lived, a hero of the highest rank.

I wandered into the bookshop like a traveler into an oasis. I grazed among the shelves, reading the blurbs, admiring the slick jackets, opening at random to see what might be inside. I breathed the lovely atmosphere of freshly printed paper. Not Harry's world, not at all, but mine—on either side of the border.

Let me be clear: it found me; I didn't find it. Some of it was the size: a massive, magisterial tome like the medieval spell books in the Hogwarts library. It tugged at me and it beckoned: come inside, it said, and step into worlds of things you didn't know.

It was a history of botanical illustration, with full-color plates of plants from medieval manuscripts, from New World expeditions, from the gardening journals of French and English chatelaines. The flowers and leaves bloomed and glowed on the delicious, heavy stock. I turned the pages over carefully, resisting the sensual urge to stroke them. My arm ached from holding the book; I had to crook my elbow around it, as if I were holding a baby. I looked at the price tag: more than I've ever spent on a book in my life, at least on this side of the border. It isn't for Harry, of course. It's for Neville, because his birthday is one day before Harry's. Neville would love this book, and would never buy it for himself. I doubt that his grandmother would either. She's not the indulgent sort.

I still don't know what I'm going to buy for Harry, but now I have something for Neville. I feel a sort of guilty relief, because I hadn't been thinking about Neville's birthday at all until the book stepped forward and told me to whom it belonged.

Birthday shopping for Harry, on the other hand, will have to be done on the other side of the border. That will call for some cleverness.

***

Not so much cleverness as all that, but luck. I ran into Dean in front of Quality Quidditch Supplies, where he'd been looking in the shop window at the latest broom accessories, thinking similarly discouraged thoughts about Harry's birthday. In his case, he knows what Harry would like, but he hasn't the cash. We adjourned to the Leaky for a pint, and struck our bargain before we'd half finished our drinks. I'll give him muggle money, he'll change it at Gringotts, he'll select the present, and we'll declare it from the two of us jointly. Mischief managed: I have money, he has an idea of what to buy, and thanks to our black market currency transaction, Harry has a birthday present.

Dean is also throwing in one of his drawings: a spectacular aerial view of the Quidditch pitch at Hogwarts, with a game in progress against the sky and the mountains. He's been working on it for weeks now and he just finished it. I squint at the tiny figures: red robes and green. Gryffindor versus Slytherin, of course. The red-robed one aloft above the proceedings must be Harry—yes, the tiny flyer has black hair—ah yes, and there's his shadow and complement, green robes and white hair; that's got to be Malfoy.

"The war against Voldemort was won on the playing fields of Hogwarts," I quip. "Dean, this is _excellent._ And I'm not even a Quidditch fan."

Dean doesn't so much smile as _glow,_ his face radiating like a sunflower at the top of his lanky, drooping frame. "So you think Harry will like it? I was worried, because it's just homemade…"

"I _know_ Harry will like it." And then I say, "Let's cross the border and get it properly framed." Because across the border, I have money.

And now I am really pleased, because not only does Harry have a present, but Dean's work is finally showcased as it truly deserves.

***


	14. Chapter 14

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Author's note: **Those who have read the story 'Scenes from a Birthday Party' will recognize the first half of this chapter… but not to worry, there are new things at the end.

*******

**Snapshots from Harry's birthday party**

**1: At Hogwarts, before departing **

In Neville's room. Hermione is wearing jeans and Tonks' purple tank top that reads "Defending Against the Dark Arts Since 1149." She's standing and holding out her periwinkle dress robes at arm's length with a critical expression. Neville is sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing jeans and a plain blue t-shirt and tying the laces on his battered trainers. Draco is reclining on the bed behind Neville with his knees up and a Potions textbook propped up on his chest. (These days, he's Neville's shadow, and walks into his rooms freely.) He is pretending to read but actually he is looking over the book at Hermione with an expression somewhere between a smirk and a leer. He is wearing Hogwarts school robes and his feet are bare.

"I don't know if I should bring dress robes. They'll be playing Quidditch after. And it is just Harry's birthday."

Neville frowns. "Gran says that Minister Shacklebolt will be there."

"I'll bring dress robes for both of us. Where are yours?" Neville rummages in the chest under his bed and pulls out a rumpled set of robes. Hermione folds up both sets and drops them into her little beaded bag.

Neville takes his invitation out of his pocket and looks at it. "It says we can bring a guest. See, _Neville Longbottom and guest._ You would have been my guest except you're already invited."

There's a fleeting expression on Draco's face, which is the sadness of a small boy not invited to the party to which everyone else is going. Hermione notices it and flinches in pity. It's promptly replaced by his Prince in Exile expression. He closes his book and sits up, feeling with his feet for the slippers he left on the floor.

"My regards to Potty and the Weasel," he says, and leaves the room.

Hermione shakes her head. There's no question of inviting him, but she still feels bad about it. And yes, she noticed the expression on his face earlier. You'd think he'd never seen a girl before. Or maybe he just never saw a girl in a tank top and jeans.

Bringing Malfoy to the Burrow would be the social equivalent of tossing a match into a puddle of gasoline. But she still feels wrong for not inviting him. And then she feels wrong because she remembers who he is and why he's here: a suspected war criminal on house arrest.

For a moment she daydreams about an alternate world, in which they're all students at university. In that world, they didn't fight on opposite sides of a war and in fact none of the three is an ex-combatant of any description. Neville's a botanist, she's a computer scientist, Draco is studying chemistry but really wants to be an actor. In that world, they're all going to the party for her friend Harry's eighteenth birthday. And they're all muggles, and don't even know it because what they really are, is _normal_, and there is no magic.

Except that world's impossible, and it's the other one she lives in.

**2: At the Burrow, looking at Neville's presents**

Under the shade tree. Neville's sitting with the huge book open in his lap, Luna looking over his shoulder with an expression of wonderment; Hermione and Dean are looking at the drawing that Luna gave to Neville for his birthday. Hermione and Luna were the only people to remember Neville's birthday.

"They're lovely, Neville, see all the little creatures on the leaves… but why aren't they moving?"

"It's a muggle book." He glances over at Hermione, who's looking at Luna's drawing. "Creatures in muggle drawings don't move."

Luna considers. "That's really spooky," she says.

He smiles at Hermione, who looks up just in time to notice.

"Do you like your book?" she asks.

"It's extravagant."

"You'd never buy it for yourself. I saw it and knew it was yours."

"You never got me a birthday present before."

"Well, divide it by eighteen and it's not so extravagant." She smiles back at him, feeling flirtatious. It's probably the effect of the tank top and jeans. She feels jaunty and devil-may-care sexy. Maybe some of Tonks' personal magic still resides in her clothes.

She looks at Luna. "This drawing's amazing. Mistletoe with Nargles. Only I don't see the Nargles."

Luna says in her dreamy but matter-of-fact way, "You don't see them if you look right at them."

Hermione looks at the exquisite linework where the mistletoe joins to the oak branch. In her peripheral vision there's a suggestion of something with tendrils or fingers, twining about the mistletoe berries and _wriggling_. The withered oak leaves, cross-hatched in black ink, rattle in a winter wind.

Dean says he liked the watercolor she gave Harry, _Thestrals in Flight over the Houses of Parliament._ Luna went to the Tate with him and fell in love with Turner and Whistler. She is unconvinced that they were Muggles. Hermione remembers the coruscating pale-orange sky and the shimmering blue-grey of the Thames, the underlit architecture and the eerie outlines against the sky. Maybe the wizarding world is about to discover impressionism.

Luna says that the thestrals in her picture are invisible to those who haven't seen death, just like their originals. There's no one at the party to ask if this is true.

**3: At the Burrow, as the cake is brought out**

Just like last year's cake, this one is shaped like a giant Snitch; Molly Weasley levitates it out to the table under the marquee where it will be cut. The summer sun lights gold and red and silver in her hair. The appreciative crowd does in fact include Minister Shacklebolt, in royal-blue robes with gold stars. Hermione is glad that she and Neville brought their dress robes, although they had to throw them on hastily over their Muggle clothes when they spotted the Minister. Now they're standing at the edge, sweating and trying to look inconspicuous. Neville is looking pink and damp, and she assumes she is too.

Andromeda is standing under the marquee with Teddy Lupin in her arms. His hair has grown out to a fat multicolored corona around his face. He's making baby faces, squeezing his eyes closed and screwing up his mouth. His nose changed shape at least once that Hermione noticed. Ron is tickling his belly and making him laugh.

Harry says something she doesn't hear, but she does hear Ron's reply. "Yeah, but there are cousins you'd rather not have. I bet Malfoy _eats_ babies."

Molly wishes Harry a happy birthday and many happy returns. Minister Shacklebolt makes a brief speech about Harry's outstanding services to the wizarding world, and how proud he is to have such outstanding young people going into Auror training.

Of whom Harry, apparently, is one. She's been out of touch. Ginny sidles up and tells her that Ron is the other one, and she's thinking about it too if she doesn't make the tryouts for the Harpies. She's holding a tumbler of firewhiskey on ice. Hermione assumes she's ferrying it to another guest until she sees Ginny lift it to her lips and take a long swig.

She learns that the diplomatic sanctions against wizarding Britain include a ban from participation in the Quidditch World Cup. Ginny says it's a shame but this should light a fire under those dolts in the Ministry to get the war crimes trials underway. She has on her blazing look as she says this, and her voice is a little too loud for politeness.

**4: At the Burrow, eating birthday cake**

Ron, Harry, Hermione, Neville are all balancing plates of cake and standing under the marquee. Ginny's standing next to Harry so that there's almost no space between them.

Ron is saying how brilliant it is that they've waived the NEWTs requirement in view of the post-war situation. (Technically it's a state of emergency, but people call it "the situation.") He and Harry have been in training since early June. The situation's dire, of course, with the werewolves and rogue Dementors, but it's a real opportunity since he can't see going back to school. He and Harry have already been on assignment. They're teaching the Patronus Charm to wizarding households in isolated locations. It's gone from "rare and difficult to master" to "essential for survival." There's a Ministry directive in draft recommending that every household in wizarding Britain have at least one member who can cast a stable Patronus.

Harry says, but that's not to be repeated outside here. Apparently there's controversy in the Ministry about whether that recommendation would create panic.

Meanwhile, Ron is telling Neville that he ought to join up, too. The Dark is by no means defeated, only splintered.

Neville shuffles his feet and says he has work at Hogwarts that he really can't leave.

Ron says, "What, you're only working with kids."

Hermione corrects: "He's working with war orphans." And then she reminds them of Tom Riddle who was an orphan fifty years before, and what he came to, growing up with nobody who cared for him.

Neville hasn't heard the story. It clearly stiffens his resolve. "So, I might be preventing the next Lord Voldemort." Ron closes his mouth, abruptly. Neville goes on, "I like teaching." He quips, "And I learned everything I needed to know from Snape." The punch line, unspoken: everything _not_ to do in front of a classroom.

Neither she nor Neville thinks to point out that he's entered a formal apprenticeship with Professor Sprout.

Later it occurs to her that no one begged _her_ to go out for Auror training. Of course, she already has a job. She's one of those dolts at the Ministry.

**5: At the Burrow, playing Quidditch**

After Shacklebolt leaves, the Weasley children organize a game of Quidditch.

There isn't a full complement on either side, and no one is playing their usual position. Hermione allows herself to be recruited, hoping that she'll fly somewhat better for the recent coaching. She's playing Chaser and Harry is playing Keeper. Ginny's playing Beater on the team opposing her, with Ron as Seeker. There are a few other people playing, too, but they're not in any of the snapshots.

There's a really good picture of her swooping past the Keeper on the other team, Quaffle under her arm, and scoring a goal. She's actually concentrating on the game instead of worrying about falling off the broom. Not that she's as good as any of the Weasleys, but at least she's not a complete disaster. Her hair is sweaty against her neck, her tank top is drenched with perspiration and her jeans chafe against the broomstick, but the look on her face is pure joy.

Tonks used to play Quidditch, she remembers, but can't recall which position. Amazing that someone that clumsy on the ground could take to the air with grace. And then there was Viktor, with his funny duck-footed walk on the ground and his sheer magnificence in flight.

There are no pictures of what happened next.

She doesn't know what hit her.

Or from what direction. Or who sent it hurtling toward her, in what was supposed to be a friendly game. All she remembers is the stunning blow in the face, the burst of stars, and then blackness.

And then she was on the ground, and they were laughing at her. Ron was saying what a rubbish player she was and always had been, and Ginny was saying, "I told you not to pretend you knew anything about Quidditch," and some unidentified Weasleys in the background were laughing. When she started to cry from the betrayal as well as the pain, Ron said what a sissy _girl_ she was and absolutely hopeless, couldn't take a little pain…

She tasted salt. There were tears and blood and snot running down her face. Disgusting as well as painful. A nasty little voice was saying how ugly she was when she cried. She couldn't tell if it were inside or outside her head. _These were supposed to be her_ _friends…_ She tried not to think that thought because it made the tears well up again.

And then someone was sitting her up and tilting her head back and waving a wand over her, tracing a figure-eight in front of her eyes. "No concussion," said a warm deep voice. Neville. Her back was resting on something warm and solid and nicely cushioned—that must be Neville, too. "But your nose is broken. Hold still." She did, not that she was inclined to do otherwise, with her head back against Neville's chest and his other hand on her forehead. "_Episkey,"_ he said, pointing his wand at the bridge of her nose, and there was a warm buzzing sensation in the broken part. She reached up to touch her nose and it was fine.

She hadn't even known that he knew that spell.

"No other broken bones," he said. "Which is something of a miracle. And now your nose won't look funny like mine."

She smiled up at him, upside-down, feeling sad and silly. "Neville, your nose is beautiful," she said.

He wrapped his arms around her and said, "Do you think you can stand up?" She took a deep breath.

"I think so." He gently lifted her to her feet. "Thank you." If she said anything more, she would start crying again.

He whispered in her ear, "You were flying really well right before it hit you." She could feel the warmth of his arms against hers, and his chest against her back. _I wish somebody loved me like this, _she thought.

Harry doesn't say a word, though he must have seen what happened.

Ron yells at her after Neville leaves: what the hell was _that_ about and what is she doing letting Neville paw her? She says he's got no place saying anything about anybody touching her and Neville was fixing her nose, the nose that got broken because somebody decided to score points on her in a supposedly friendly game. And in any case there's no case for him acting jealous, since they've broken up, right, because if they _haven't_ broken up, why is she living in a cubbyhole at Hogwarts?

**6: At the Burrow, under the shade tree with Luna**

Hermione is sitting out the rest of the Quidditch match. George took her place as Chaser, and she's watching the game with half her usual attention while nursing her shock and humiliation and trying not to cry. Neville has already gone back to Hogwarts, after leaving with her his Gran's invitation for the first weekend in August.

Luna arranges the diaphanous layers of her dress robes and sits down next to her.

She notices that she's taken a sharp breath and is holding it. It's Luna, obviously, about to say something bizarre and unprovable. _Constant vigilance. Don't mistake your thoughts for what is really going on. _She corrects herself. No, it's her reaction to Luna. Her reaction, she realizes, which is an old habit by now: a reflexive flinch born of irritation. She and Luna don't see the world the same way, but Luna has never done anything malicious or hurtful to her. And she remembers Mr. Ollivander telling them what a comfort Luna's company had been, during their incarceration in the underground room at Malfoy Manor. Hermione wonders if anyone would find _her_ company a comfort in those circumstances. After all, their prospects had been pretty dismal and as a rational person she'd have had to say that.

Luna says, "I wanted to thank you for what you did for Daddy."

Hermione doesn't understand.

"You got him out of Azkaban." Luna goes on to explain that Xenophilius is now on house arrest and is doing much better, though the Aurors are still picking through the ruined tower for evidence. They won't be able to start rebuilding the house until the Ministry gives permission.

Hermione had no idea that Xenophilius Lovegood had been in Azkaban. She had not even thought to ask for the list of those interned. After all, the description had been clear: "Death Eaters and their sympathizers." Then she remembers that once Luna was imprisoned, Xenophilius changed the editorial line of the _Quibbler_ in the hopes of assuring her safety, and then he tried to turn them over to the Death Eaters. So she supposes someone could have put him down as a sympathizer, or at least a collaborator.

Luna finishes by saying that she read it in the _Daily Prophet,_ but since for once they were saying good things about Hermione, she guessed that it had to be true.

Hermione turns to face Luna. She takes in the long flaxen hair, the wide, protuberant blue eyes and the dreamy expression. "Thank _you,_" she says. "You're the first person who actually thought I did the right thing."

Or at least who's said so. She realizes that Neville didn't say anything, but she reads that as tacit approval. If Neville disapproved, he would say so.

As opposed to Ron, who ranted about the Malfoys as if they were the only ones on that list. As opposed to Harry, whose take was more merciful but who didn't want to get into who did what. As opposed to Draco, who owed her the same thanks but wouldn't give it. And if she was actually starting to be less irritated by Draco, she could certainly make at least that effort with Luna, who after all was on her side.

She changes the subject, and asks Luna about how she did the wonderful painting with the thestrals. Luna tells her it's an experimental charm. She found it in her mother's notebooks, and she's been using it on sketching excursions to London with Dean. And she reckons it will come in handy once her father is freed and they can go on another expedition in search of the elusive Snorkack.

**7: At the Burrow, drinking pumpkin juice with Percy**

Long blue-green shadows stretch across the sunlit grass, and the light is taking a turn toward late-afternoon mellowness. Percy sits down in the grass next to her and offers her a tumbler of pumpkin juice.

She accepts, and raises it to him in a toast, "To the unsung hero."

He makes a wry face.

She smiles. "I saw that paperwork. And I found some more. If I had to arraign you for sabotage, I'd say it went back a good six months before the battle."

He takes a deep breath and lets it out in a sigh. "I'd really rather you didn't talk about that." The tone is flat and grim. He's not being modest; it's a serious request. "It isn't over, and it isn't going to help." He gestures toward his brothers and Ginny, who are standing under the marquee with bottles of butterbeer and tumblers of firewhiskey. "They took me back, but they don't forgive. And Penelope didn't either."

Hence the absence of Penelope Clearwater from a social occasion where all the invitations included invitee _and guest._

He concludes, "And as I said, it isn't over. I really don't want it noised abroad in the Ministry. It could make things very difficult. Not just for me, but in general." She remembers the pureblood functionaries on the War Crimes Commission, the ones whose previous affiliations she suspects. She wonders if Percy means that he might have to duplicate the feat in future, which would be impossible if they knew what he'd done. Which in turn makes her glad that she hadn't yet taken her discovery to Boudicca Derwent. Naively, she'd meant to recommend Percy for a decoration for valor.

There's a very long, uncomfortable silence. She sips her pumpkin juice. It's cold and sweet. Then she says, conversationally, "So what does the Temporary Ad Hoc Committee on Dispensing actually do?"

Percy launches into a brief history of the Committee, which was originally formed to solve the problem of replacing Ollivander's services as wandmaker of preference to wizarding Britain. The need was urgent due to Ollivander's poor health and the large number of muggleborn witches and wizards who had been deprived of their wands under the Thicknesse Ministry. The problem was not as simple as originally posed, and the Committee's responsibilities have expanded as the extent of the muggle-born refugee problem has become clear, though without any concomitant increase in funding. Hence the stacks of parchment in Percy's office and the long hours at his desk. In fact, he has three or four reports in draft up in his room at the Burrow.

"Not on cauldron bottom thickness, I would guess," she says.

"No, but that was a good rehearsal," he replies. "Getting the details right. Only in this case, the details are pretty grim." He's been cataloguing the ways in which the internal refugee problem is propagating into a Statute of Secrecy problem. Substantial numbers of Muggle-born adults no longer feel safe in the wizarding world, in Britain or abroad, and are demanding repatriation to the world of their birth--_with_ compensation and re-training. Some have already crossed over without assistance. Muggle-born children have been withdrawn from the wizarding world, and the Aurors are sufficiently busy with the werewolf problem that no one's been deputed to track down and Obliviate the families. In any case, it's not clear that's proper procedure.

The extent of social disruption isn't clear yet but early indications are disquieting. The genocidal measures against the Muggle-born targeted over a quarter of the population, and the most productive segment at that. Some of the best Ministry workers were Muggle-born, and they've been replaced with purebloods who are long on aristocratic pretension and short on performance, which has further muddled things at the Ministry, as if it needed any help in that direction.

She's taken aback to hear Percy criticize the Ministry, but then he's not the same bright young functionary he was two years ago. His spectacles mask somewhat the dark circles under his eyes, but nothing hides the pallor of his skin. This is the first time he's seen daylight in a while.

He adds, not that it's his department any more, but the effect on the Ministry is duplicated in the trade sector, which, she'll learn, is putting yet more pressure on the Ministry for the war crimes trials to proceed in a speedy fashion.

She sees Bill and Fleur beckoning to her. He sees them too and proposes a lunch date for the next week to continue the conversation. His treat.

She apologizes to him for having taken his brothers' opinion of him at face value, and they set the date for lunch. She's impressed with how much he knows, and she thinks some of it may have a bearing on the War Crimes Commission work.

He says, "Oh, very definitely it does. But you're sworn to secrecy, of course."

**8: Under the marquee, with Bill and Fleur**

Hermione is drinking her first butterbeer of the afternoon while she's talking with Bill and Fleur. Harry is walking through the late-afternoon grass, holding little Teddy in his arms. Teddy was fussing noisily earlier, but he's settling somewhat as Harry walks with him. She can't hear the exact words, but Harry is carrying on a soothing monologue to the baby. Ginny is sitting under the shade tree, watching him. From time to time, Harry looks up from Teddy's fluffy hair to meet Ginny's eyes. If you drew a dotted line across the space between them, the intensity could not be more plain. They're as solidly a couple as her own parents. She's a little in awe of that, actually.

She's congratulating Bill and Fleur on their first anniversary, which is the next day. The day that the Ministry fell, it was. Bill says that he sincerely hopes that all future anniversaries will be solidly dull. Their wedding day was more than enough excitement for a lifetime.

Fleur asks her how she's doing. She understands what's meant. She tells Fleur that she made the potion and is taking it at the recommended intervals.

"No trouble?" Fleur asks.

"None at all," she says, and realizes after the fact that Fleur was referring to Molly. "No, none at all," she repeats. "I got some help at Hogwarts."

Fleur nods, and says, "That Neville is a very nice boy. You have some good friends."

Behind her, the chorus of rowdy male voices is getting louder by the minute. Ron and George, it is. Amazing how loud two boys—men?—can get with a little chemical assistance. Ron is talking about the upcoming trials and how he wants to see the lot of them sent up for a very long time, because he's had enough of this. He's been listening to their trash every year since he was eleven, and it makes him sick that he's been mocked for not having enough money, which thank you very much is a sign of his father's integrity. Not everybody at the Ministry was in Lucius Malfoy's pocket. Some people can't bloody be bought, and if the wanker thinks his money is buying him out of a term in Azkaban, he's got another thought entirely. He'd personally like to see him get the Kiss, and not behind the prison walls either. He'd like to see it up close, just to be sure that it was done for real. It might be a complete waste of time, too, if it turns out that Lucius doesn't actually have a soul--which Ron has more than suspected, given what he did to Ginny. The bastard had some nerve, coming to the bloody Ministry and bloody Hogwarts with his barefaced gall and talking his nonsense about blood traitors and keeping out the mudbloods. Well, he understands Lucius got what was coming to him, if he thought his Dark Lord was such a grand fellow. That wasn't what it looked like at the end. And sorry, but Harry is being soft on this one. No, he wants to see the son of a bitch publicly executed.

And George chimes in that if the Dementors are still hungry after that one, they can throw the little git to them, too, because he deserves it on principle. Little prick let the Death Eaters into Hogwarts, and if it weren't for that, Bill wouldn't have his face cut up like that. Let the little bastard suffer too—and George remembers with relish how the Dementors terrified the brat, third year—yeah, he almost wet himself, and then he had the gall to make fun of Harry. Well, we'll see who's laughing now, won't we.

Hermione notices Bill wincing. Arthur comes over to the marquee and remonstrates with them. She can't hear what he's saying, because Ron and George drown him out.

"Everybody knows they're total shit. Yeah, _Narcissa_ too…"

"You know it's true, and why can't we say it out loud for once?"

At which Arthur takes Ron by the arm and drags him back to the house, with a furiously apologetic glance back at Andromeda, who's been sitting quietly at the edge all this time. George follows in their wake, trying to explain himself.

"Not in public," Arthur says, and the back door slams behind them.

***

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – first week of August 1998?)**

A new nightmare.

Darkness, and a gleaming flat sea. Hard, reflective, and across it—loops an endlessly unwinding braid of glossy scales… a sea monster. Or a snake, gigantic beyond belief, uncoiling and flowing across the table. It's not the sea but a table, and over it floats a face, a living face, an upside-down tragic mask runneled with tears, until the green light flashes and it slackens to dead meat.

Nothing as horrifying as the moment when living flesh turns into dead meat. The rot begins immediately, unless something else eats it in the meantime. The huge snake is a meat eater, no question. The jaws open over the collapsed figure; there's a wet tearing noise and fangs scrape bone. Over the scene sounds the high cold hissing of a not-quite-human voice whose words I can never make out.

This isn't my dream. I know that it isn't my dream because somehow in this dream I have a male body. Not that sex figures in this at all, but I'm not in my own skin.

And then the snake made for my face, jaws yawning, and I screamed myself awake. I didn't set anything on fire this time, but I woke to pounding on the door. I stumbled out of bed and asked who it was. Neville. I opened the door, eyes still puffy with sleep.

"It's five o'clock in the morning and I heard you screaming," he said.

"Bad dream," I mumbled. "The damned snake." I blinked myself awake. "Sorry. You killed it. I shouldn't be dreaming about it."

"That doesn't stop my nightmares," Neville said.

And there was his pale shadow behind him, wrapped in a dressing gown and looking like a ghost, for all that his bare feet were firmly planted on the stone floor and no light passed through him. I must have woken Draco, too. I nodded in his direction. "Sorry," I mumbled.

He looked at me curiously, his eyes far more awake than mine. I waited for him to make a snide remark about my newly acquired snake phobia, but he didn't, just stood there with his arms wrapped around himself as if he were cold and had to pull his clothes tight around him to stay warm.

I made my apologies again in the general direction of my rudely awakened neighbors, and then closed the door and went back to bed.

***

The conference room where the War Crimes Commission meets is close and dusty. It feels to Hermione like a cellar even though the mullioned windows let in diffuse artificial sunshine and the mirrors on the back wall give the sense of even more space. The tapestries on the front wall must be holding dust and she wonders if anyone has Scourgified them in the last century.

She watches the eternal circle dance of unicorns and centaurs among stylized forest and rose garden. It's a whole lot more appetizing than the primly composed faces across from her. One of them has a demure little throat-clearing noise that's just the faintest breath short of Umbridge's _hem, hem._ She wonders if they're Umbridge's creatures. They certainly sound like it.

The one with the breathy little voice and the throat-clearing noise is saying, "We _must_ consider Ministry affiliations for prospective defendants. That's nearly as important as blood status, don't you think?" Oh yes, Hermione thinks, so you can be sure to keep any of your own well clear of it. And never mind that blood status is unscientific bosh, but you ninnies believed in it. Believe in it still, because if you didn't have that, what would you have?

Shacklebolt isn't saying anything, just watching. Making mental notes, no doubt. Hermione catches his eye and he gives her the flicker of an eyelid that says, _Carry on, Granger._ So she doesn't say anything either.

There's three of them who always sit across from her in the War Crimes Commission meetings. Two males, one female. Breathy-voice is the female (she also thinks of her on occasion as Umbridge Junior.) She's dubbed them See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil—"of the Ministry" as the direct object, of course. Never, ever, not even in the face of attempted genocide, should evil be seen, heard or spoken of the Ministry.

They look through her as if she isn't there.

It takes generations of inbreeding to produce that kind of moronic smugness, she thinks, and debates with herself if it's more or less pernicious than the showy animus of Malfoy senior. Well, pernicious or not, that toad-like smugness and watchful waiting has survival value. None of the Ministry defendants were in Azkaban for a minute. Dolores Umbridge and Pius Thicknesse started out on _administrative leave,_ for Merlin's sake, and that's been _upgraded _to house arrest. Reluctantly. In the name of leveling the field with the defendants who had been in Azkaban, and in response to some very powerful external pressure. She's not sure of the source of that pressure, but in less than two months she's developed a sense for when these folk are moving under their own power and when they're being pushed.

She jots down: _Blood status—how to code? (their categories or multiple fields capturing all available info? e.g. muggle-born Y/N for family tree and inherit blood status from family-tree structure, or code each tree node muggle/wizard/squib/unknown.)Ministry affiliation: employee of Ministry Y/N; rank (civil service grade??? How is this done?); department?; non-employee relationship to Ministry? (consultants, patrons? Look into patron/client relationships in wizarding world, e.g. Malfoy sr network pre-LV, Dumbledore & Order of Phoenix, Prof Slughorn's Slug Club, who else?) Q. network structure of Death Eaters & affiliates?_

Every word out of their mouths is days of work for her. Every time they add a field, she has to set up the structure and then do a full pass through all of the Pensieve depositions and the parchments, collecting the necessary information. It's bad practice, and it would have been so much simpler if they'd agreed on what they wanted in the beginning, because then it could have been done in a single pass. But that's not what has her angry at the moment.

One of the other two toads is saying, "In view of the _regrettable_ public comment about Ministry policy and the current state of emergency, we think it advisable to enact formal press censorship." Hermione clenches her hand into a fist—the hand that's out of sight under the table, the hand that she's not going to use to make a left-handed grab for her wand—until she feels her short nails biting into her palm. Boudicca Derwent, next to her, jots: _Stay calm. We'll sort this._

Minister Shacklebolt says, "A state of emergency calls for more information flow, not less. Furthermore, censorship will lose us prestige." He smiles a warm reassuring smile with no trace of shark in it. "We appreciate your concern for the public image of the Ministry, but that measure is more likely to redound to our discredit."

_Spell it out for the morons, _she thinks._ It's stupid for them to try to look like the Thicknesse Ministry._ _Even if that's what they actually are—a continuation of business per usual._

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – August 1998)**

At the doctor.

I have a diagnosis now, quite firm. Post-traumatic stress. I knew that before, but now a professional has put a name to it, the doctor I've seen since I was eight or nine. My parents knew him from the time they were all in school together.

In between, he asks me how they're liking their travels abroad.

Oh, quite well, as far as I know, I say, and feel like a liar. Worse than a liar.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I'm getting dressed after the physical exam. Odd what I notice under electric light that never strikes me under the softer lights of the other world: namely, the ugly scars across my ribs and belly. For the first time, I think about what it would be like to take off my clothes and have someone else—not a doctor or nurse—ask about those marks. Someone who wouldn't recognize their names.

That's what it would mean to date a Muggle, or even go swimming with one.

Lab accident at boarding school. That's the official explanation in my NHS medical record.

I don't worry particularly when I'm wearing a cropped T-shirt or rolled-up jersey while flying at the Weasleys, and at Hogwarts the robes cover everything. And when I was with Ron, well, yes, we did take off clothes so far as the crowded conditions at the Burrow permitted, but the scars were never a matter for particular remark. Ron has a particularly ugly one on his shoulder where he lost that chunk of flesh after splinching himself this last year. We know each other's history, so if the scars on my torso have a name to him, it's "Battle of the Department of Mysteries."

I can recite the scars for my friends and my more intimate enemies as well, like a bard retelling the sagas of a winter's night. Harry's are the most obvious, the lightning-bolt on his forehead and the crabbed script on the back of his right hand that spells out 'I will not tell lies.' Ron's shoulder is scarred from the splinching. Neville's burns healed pretty miraculously well, but he still has a broken nose that nobody set, and over one cheekbone there's the white trace of a cut that dates from last year. Ginny has a similar set, though her truly frightening injuries are internal. From what I read between the lines, last year was nothing compared to the terror of her first year, as she had her soul and will eaten by Tom Riddle's infernal diary. I haven't stood close enough to Dean or Luna to inventory their scars, but now that I've played about with Polyjuice I know Draco's scars, which are fewer and less visible than I'd expect given what I know of his story. Lucky, spoiled Draco, who's gotten away with more than anybody ought to.

The scars all have names. "When Voldemort tried to kill Harry," "when Umbridge tortured Harry in detention," "when Ron splinched himself," "when the Carrows tortured Neville," "Ginny's curse scars from the Battle of Hogwarts," "Sectumsempra," "when the chandelier at Malfoy Manor fell and shattered." Nobody from outside our circle, let alone outside our world, knows the names as well as we do.

So when Nigel asked me out again, I turned him down yet again. Without hesitation, and I think it's because he would remark on those scars, and I could not name them to him.

That's his name: Nigel. (Not Trevor, and we won't ask why I had him confused with Neville's toad.) Nigel Black. I almost laughed aloud when he told me. No, I did _not_ ask him if he were Draco Malfoy's Muggle cousin.

In fact, I bit my tongue so I wouldn't ask if he were related to the Blacks of Grimmauld Place, or if I might have known his cousins. Sirius. Bellatrix. Draco. Peculiar people named after stars or constellations, with whom I have an even more peculiar history. Imagine asking him, "Did you happen to have a cousin who was unjustly imprisoned for twelve years in a tower in the North Sea?" Or "Do you have a boy cousin my age who's remarkably talented at flying a broom?"

Or, for that touch of ice in the blood, "Might you have a cousin who tortured me this past Easter?"

It didn't matter. He was hinting about his people's country place and their London house. He missed entirely my successful struggle not to give myself away, and as a result he didn't understand why I turned him down again. Poor Nigel, for all that he's a supercilious public-school prat; I think he's actually looking closely enough to know that there's more under the surface than I'm telling him, and that's what attracts him: the exotic, what he doesn't know, the lively darkness behind the public mask. What's in that darkness is precisely what both my common sense and the law of my adopted world forbid me to tell.

***

At lunch with Percy at the Leaky Cauldron, Hermione notices that he's actually quite attractive when he's engrossed in technical details. He's running an absent hand through his red hair between paragraphs, as he tells her things she never knew about wizarding trade and the effects of the late war. His hazel eyes are sparkling behind his glasses, and he's a bit flushed, though that could be from the pint he had with lunch. He's making rather more eye contact with her than he ever did when she was his errant younger brother's school friend.

She had no idea the cauldron specifications report was that interesting. Percy sets her right. As she knows (he says pedantically) the report came out of the Ministry during the interwar period, though the moving force behind it was the firm of Chattox & Device Witchgear. She's puzzled.

"Look at the hallmark on your cauldron from Potions class," he says. Or for that matter, on any of the equipment in the Potions classroom at Hogwarts. They're the leading firm in cauldron manufacture, as well as in several other branches of durable goods and communications in Wizarding Britain. Necessarily they had an interest in keeping back the tide of shoddy goods from abroad—and incidentally maintaining their dominant position not only in wizarding Britain but on the Continent.

Hermione hasn't heard either name before, not in wizarding circles or in History of Magic either. Percy waves a dismissive hand and sketches the history: two pureblood families, at daggers drawn in the era before the Statute of Secrecy, whose feud exploded beyond the bounds of the wizarding world and caught the attention of the Muggle authorities. After a significant number of executions by the Muggles and a reprimand from the Ministry, they made up and have kept their heads down ever since—or at least have played out their rivalries in industrial espionage in their native Lancashire rather than in open combat. They have long since intermarried, and both families are now extinct in the male line.

They never told us this in History of Magic, she says, frowning.

He goes on, rather censoriously, to point out that History of Magic covers goblin rebellions, wizarding wars, political treaties and rogue Dark Magicians. History of technology falls between the cracks. An occasional well-informed lecturer in Muggle Studies will tell you how nineteenth-century improvements to the Floo network were inspired by Muggle inventions such as the railroad and the telegraph, but it's rare that you get the details of the applied Charms and Arithmancy work done by Sophonisba Chattox.

Of Chattox & Device? Hermione asks.

Percy gives her the beneficent smile reserved for attentive students. A brilliant witch, and a very wealthy one—as if her family hadn't already been rich from their virtual monopoly on the Potions equipment trade. A rare instance of a Pureblood who made it her business to cultivate Muggle-borns, because of their access to the world in which problems had to be solved by imagination rather than magic. No, he didn't learn this in History of Magic, or for that matter in Charms or Arithmancy. He didn't learn about it until he did the reading for the cauldron specifications report. It gave him an understanding of his father's fascination with Muggle inventions, and an additional appreciation of just how rare that interest is in Pureblood circles. Down to the present day, most of the technical staff at Chattox & Device are Muggle-born, so needless to say the current custodian of the fortune was not amused by the policies of the Thicknesse Ministry.

The Thicknesse Ministry. Which is to say, Voldemort, Hermione corrects.

Percy winces at the name.

Well, I'm not going to call him He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Hermione says. He's dead. And I'm not afraid of a _name_. Anyway, if you don't fancy calling him Voldemort, you can call him plain Tom Riddle.

So, Percy continues, ignoring the aside, Chattox & Device Witchgear are still upset at the Ministry about the loss in revenue, particularly from the Continent. In particular, they don't think they ought to be boycotted by Central Europe, because they opposed Grindelwald _and_ You-Know-Who. Though wizarding trade is not Percy's bailiwick these days. Luckily. You-Know-Who didn't come to the Ministry personally to do his lobbying, but the custodian of the Chattox & Device fortune does. And, trust him, that is not something you want in your in-box, especially since that Illustrious Personage lost children in the _last_ war.

So I have a vulgar question, Hermione says. Just how big is that fortune? I mean, say, compared to the Malfoys?

Percy says that he actually doesn't know. He isn't sure that anyone does, because Chattox & Device have always played their hand very close. They don't travel in the same circles as the Malfoys, and they don't show off their wealth. As far as he can tell, they plow it back into the business or spend it on their own causes. One of which, he's recently learned, was the Order of the Phoenix.

He also recalls the facial expression he once saw the Illustrious Personage cast at the back of Lucius Malfoy, and the subsequent remark to the effect that trash rises. Which tells him that now, politically and financially, if not in literal fact, Lucius is a dead man. Percy's wager on the outcome of the War Crimes Trials is that the Malfoys will be expropriated. There's no way otherwise to pay for the measures necessary to repair Wizarding Britain, not least of which is a significant increase in the Auror Department's budget, to handle the werewolf problem and the Dementor problem and possibly the Inferi problem. None of which, thank Merlin, are his department. He just hopes there's something left over to handle the refugee problem.

On their way back to the Ministry, Percy stops to buy a copy of the _Daily Prophet,_ and it's there, standing on the threshold of the public Floo in the Leaky, that they read the headline about the suicide of the late Minister for Magic, Pius Thicknesse, and his wife.

***

**Author's note:** The firm of Chattox & Device Witchgear appears by way of A. J. Hall (who places wizarding Britain's industrial sector in the North, like its Muggle counterpart); I have made some modification to the particulars of their technical and financial interests. The surnames are those of two families involved in the 1612 trial of the Lancashire Witches; the historical record appears to indicate that a feud between them led to mutual incrimination in one of the most famous witch trials of the reign of James I. In Hall's universe (and mine) this was a collision between wizarding folk and the Muggle world in one of its uglier phases. Compare the date of the Statute of Secrecy (1692).


	15. Chapter 15

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

Returning from lunch to the Ministry, she finds that Boudicca Derwent has a copy of the same edition of the _Daily Prophet._ It's open on her desk between the Pensieves and the rack of memory vials. As Hermione comes in, she closes it and stands. "You've seen the news about Pius Thicknesse."

"I saw the headline," Hermione answers. "I'm assuming there's more to it…"

"The coverage is actually more or less responsible," Derwent says. "For the _Daily Prophet,_ that is. Skeeter actually mentions that there have been other suicides in the past months. Granted, it's in the last few paragraphs, but that's better than nothing. And she got the basic wording of the recommendations for Imperius victims right. More or less, but that's an improvement on her usual."

She hands the newspaper to Hermione. "I'm hoping that we'll be seeing them at St. Mungo's, rather than the morgue. Unfortunately, there's still far too much talk about people only succumbing to that curse through _weakness of character._ And given what they'll have been doing, the poor devils…" She shakes her head. "We've learned a bit since the last war about detecting who's been under Imperius and who hasn't, but that doesn't touch the problem of guilt for the acts committed."

For approximately the hundredth time since the end of the war, Hermione is thankful that she has access to help in two worlds. And that she wasn't a victim of that particular Unforgivable curse. And, all things considered, that she's walked out of the wreckage more or less intact.

"There's something I wanted to ask you about," she says. "There's a memory I was looking at that really bothered me." She takes a breath. "It was someone I knew… being forced to do dreadful things. Not under Imperius, as far as I could tell. You could check it to be sure. Only—what's the legal status of casting the Unforgivables if you're under duress?"

Derwent frowns. "That will be up to the Wizengamot. And strictly off the record, it will depend upon _who_ it was who did this. Or rather, which side."

Hermione isn't sure if she should specify further. "Not the winning side," she says. "So if someone was on the winning side and cast Unforgivables, they're going to have an easier time of it." Not that she isn't nauseated by what she saw Draco doing in that memory, but she remembers that Harry cast Cruciatus on Amycus Carrow, rather gratuitously as she remembers now.

Derwent raises an eyebrow. "The list of war crimes defendants has not been issued, but I can assure you that your friend Mr. Potter is not on it."

Hermione takes a step back in surprise. Derwent gives her a sardonic half-smile. "You've done a fine job of cataloguing all instances of the Unforgivables in the available memories and setting up the necessary data structure. I took the liberty of running a draft query to see how many individuals had cast them. And _which _individuals, and how many times. 'Under what circumstances' is something we haven't catalogued. We might want to think about how to capture that, given the difficulty your other friend is likely to find himself in."

"He's not my friend," she says, reflexively. "And I don't approve of what he did. But it is a question of fairness."

***

That evening, she sees Boudicca Derwent again, but this time at St. Mungo's and as a patient rather than an assistant. She takes her journal out of her beaded bag and leafs through the entries for the past three weeks, listing off how many times she's woken having cast wandless spells, chiefly _Incendio, Reducto, Aguamenti _(the Room of Requirement nightmare is particularly bad for that one).

"Any close calls with anything serious?" Derwent asks, doing another diagnostic spiral with her wand.

"Nothing Unforgivable, if that's what you mean," Hermione says. "I had a word with the one who set me off and he's been less provocative since." Derwent smiles knowingly; not for the first time, Hermione wonders what she knows that she isn't telling. "I'm not having too much wild magic when I'm awake. It's when I'm asleep that it's a problem." She confirms that the nightmares are still continuing, both the ones she has in her own right and the ones resulting from viewing Pensieve memories.

Derwent asks her for clarification on that.

Well, there are the particularly horrible things she's seen, but the ones that seem to persist are the ones from the Polyjuice and Pensieve experiment. What she doesn't say: She's grateful at least that she isn't having flashbacks to casting Cruciatus as the torturer's apprentice. It was pure luck that she didn't review that particular memory while Polyjuiced as Draco.

Derwent frowns and says that she'll add that to the notes. "You haven't repeated those experiments, I hope," she says. "It's quite a brilliant idea, but I don't think it's prudent for you in your current condition."

Hermione couldn't agree more. Derwent goes on, "Your condition—which I should note is pathological—is in some sense a revisiting of the roots of magic. It's uncontrolled, and it draws rather too much on your essential self—hence primitive, and rather close to what we classify as Dark." She says, "Of course, a person of your background isn't likely to find this _glamorous…"_

"Glamorous? It's more like living hell. I'm scared all the time."

"Well, in certain Pureblood circles, wild magic—particularly wild Dark magic—has a particular cachet—how shall I say it? An edgy sort of sex appeal. " She adds, "There's a degenerative condition associated with long-term practice of magic without use of a wand—or certain classes of spells, with or without a wand, the Unforgivables chief among them. Hence the truism that Dark magicians die mad. They'll have covered this in your History of Magic course, but that's why we use wands in the first place: to channel the magic without using your entire soul and mind."

Hermione shakes her head. "They didn't tell us that in History of Magic." _Another strike against the Hogwarts curriculum._ "And nobody ever really told us what was Dark and what wasn't. Except one year in Defense" (she strains to remember how Snape actually put it) "they said the Dark Arts were ever-changing, chaotic…"

"Yes, and in some of our older families, there's an irresistible urge to explore that chaos and darkness. It's practically traditional—as in your world, the use of dangerous drugs is _de rigueur _in certain circles."

Hermione is fascinated by this glance into Pureblood culture, and it must show on her face, because Derwent hastens to add, "I cannot sufficiently emphasize that your current symptoms indicate a pathological condition, no matter what some of your peers may think."

She shakes her head. "No one's said anything of the sort." (However, this is definitely making some things about the Black family slot into place, the relatively short life spans for one. Maybe it's not just genetic collapse from inbreeding.) "I probably haven't spent a lot of time in the circles you're talking about—unless the Weasleys or the Longbottoms have reputations as Dark magicians."

Derwent smiles and says, "No, I think you're safe enough. Just be warned that at some point you will encounter the attitude of which I spoke, and it would be most prudent to pass by that sort of thing without dipping in." Hermione looks at her quizzically. "I mention this because of your otherwise laudable penchant for experiment. Those are experiments you cannot afford. In any case the data are already in, for the last thousand years."

***

As usual, Neville is waiting for her when she finishes her appointment with Derwent. He had stopped in to check on his parents along with his Gran. Mrs. Longbottom reminds Hermione of the invitation for the coming weekend. Then she steps into the public Floo, calls out "Longbottom House, Roughlee-in-Pendle, Lancashire" and is gone.

Hermione and Neville will be traveling there on Saturday morning, following the full-moon curfew.

Tonight he isn't going home with Gran, but back to Hogwarts. It's still light out, so they step outside to Apparate to Hogsmeade and hike up to the castle. Hermione asks him if he'd like to take a walk around the lake before they go back to their rooms. She's still thinking about the conversation earlier with Boudicca Derwent, and she's not sure she wants to sit in a closed room with those thoughts, nor (she admits grudgingly) to share Neville's company with Draco, who's his nearly constant shadow these days.

Neville doesn't ask her what she's thinking about so hard. That's restful; they can walk without talking being required. The late light catches on the surface of the lake and turns it to dull silver as the surrounding mountains drop into shadow.

They're walking along the soft turf just shy of the muddy margin of the lake, and the grass muffles their footsteps. She wraps her cloak around her and shivers a little.

After a pause, Neville asks her if she's feeling cold.

She tells him that the chill isn't from the outside. More from what she's been thinking.

She's been going around and around in her head about the question of the Unforgivable Curses. She remembers the demonstration that fake-Moody did in the Defense class in fourth year, in particular the expression on Neville's face when Moody cast Cruciatus on the spider. Last year, the Carrows were teaching that curse to students from age eleven on up, and making them practice it. One of the opening salvos in the resistance effort was Neville's refusal to do it.

But other people she knows—schoolmates, contemporaries, friends—have cast it. Harry's among them, and there's no question, from the memory she reviewed, that he cast it successfully. Amycus Carrow was writhing and screaming on the floor just as plainly as anybody that Bellatrix tortured. And McGonagall approved Harry's action—even called him 'gallant' of all things, for something that's supposed to carry a life sentence in Azkaban.

Boudicca Derwent just told her that Harry isn't going to be charged, but Draco certainly will. And Draco cast it more than once, including in his duel with Harry in sixth year. She wonders what supplemental tutorial Draco got at home, if that was the first curse to come to mind when he was surprised in a vulnerable position. Not that Draco was in his right mind in sixth year, but still… well, she could just as well say that McGonagall wasn't in _her_ right mind when she failed to rebuke Harry for what he did.

And what about the kids in the Carrows' defense class—the ones who did the assignment? Are they going to be sent to Azkaban?

She feels Neville's hand on her shoulder. "What's the matter?" he asks. She realizes that she's come to a stop, arms wrapped around herself, and she's rocking and shaking her head.

"I'm thinking about your kids," she says. "What they did when the Carrows were teaching the Dark Arts class, and what's going to happen to them."

Neville frowns. "They were underage," he says.

"You said no to casting Cruciatus, but most of them didn't. It was a school assignment."

"Hermione, for me there wasn't a question of saying _yes,_" he said. "I _couldn't._"

"But there are people who did. Not just the kids, but people our age. They were of age, and they did it. I'm just thinking about how many of them are going to Azkaban. And what Azkaban _is._ I mean, answering torture with torture doesn't make a lot of sense to me."

Neville says, "If we didn't have Azkaban…" and his voice trails off. "Nobody ever spelled it out in words. But I think it's that if we didn't have Azkaban, we'd have the likes of Bellatrix Lestrange and Barty Crouch at liberty to do as they liked, and not just to witches and wizards but Muggles too. And that would be the end of the Statute of Secrecy." He pauses. "And I think that would be the end of _us._ It's not the middle ages any more. I think the Muggles could wipe us out if they set their hands to it."

"But the Ministry sends innocent people to Azkaban," she says. "There was Sirius Black, for example. They didn't even give him a proper trial, and he was sent up for life. They could have had him questioned by a Legilimens and he would have been cleared. Why didn't somebody hunt up Dumbledore? For that matter, why didn't Dumbledore _volunteer?_"

Neville shakes his head. "Remember what you said back in June, when we were at the pub?" She doesn't. "We were talking about flying and walking. You said that flyers miss a lot of detail, and that so did wizarding folk in general. You said that magic isn't the only way to get things done. I've been thinking about that a lot lately."

They're walking again. He says, "McGonagall told me that you know about Draco. How he's having problems with magic, and that I've been teaching him—"

"Muggle studies, the practicum. Yes. I wouldn't imagine he's the most amenable student."

Neville laughs. "No, but he asks interesting questions. He's getting a crash course in all those details that wizards miss. The other day, he asked me, 'So why do Muggle clothes have so many pockets? Is that for all the tools?' He was complaining that there were already too many tools to carry about with him. You see, I was teaching him how to use a cigarette lighter…"

"He's taken up smoking cigarettes?"

"No, for lighting fires and candles and such. I hope he learns how to lay a fire before winter. Otherwise, I'm going to be in his room twice a day taking care of it." Hermione suppresses the sour thought that Draco probably expects just that, and is feigning incompetence. "He has almost no sense of cause and effect. He's used to waving the wand and having things jump into place. He's never had to think about the natural world. He's unclear on physical laws, even. Magic lets you skate around a lot of things."

"So he's frustrated because each job requires a different tool."

"Among other things. And he's easily frustrated. It makes me grateful for being raised half-Muggle. At least I'm not reduced to tears by a candle that won't light instantly."

Hermione thinks about that picture. "Not pretty, I would imagine."

"It used to be screaming fits. But I'd just leave the room when he did that."

"So what does this have to do with the wizarding justice system?"

"It's cobbled-together. Apply some heavy-duty magic in the right place, and the problem will go away. Scare the population with Dementors, and everyone will keep inside the lines. And we daren't take the chance of things getting out of hand, so assume guilt. Make lots of rules, and make sure that people know not to break them. After all, we're in a three-hundred-year state of emergency."

Hermione protests, "But they're doing it differently this time. It's going to be an actual trial. Otherwise I wouldn't have a job setting up the evidence database."

"It's only under extreme pressure from the outside. Gran has been telling me…" He pauses. "This isn't official and I never told you." (How many times has she heard some variant of this phrase recently?) "North America broke off relations completely. It's just shy of a state of war. They're terrified about the Statute of Secrecy. They've got Muggle politicians over there already talking about witches without any evidence that there is such a thing. The same lot whose answer to anything is _bomb the hell out of it,_ even if they can't find it on a map. Imagine what they'd do if they knew we were real, and worse if they could find us."

He adds, "Gran told me that there were plenty of witches and wizards killed in the Blitz. She was there. It wasn't only Grindelwald who killed our lot. We're _not_ physically invincible, just a little tougher than the Muggle average."

He goes on, "The North Americans have their own idiot Pureblood faction up in arms about blood purity and the Muggle threat, and their Ministry for Magic wants to be quite sure that Britain _sets an example_ before some home-grown Voldemort decides to take things into his or her own hands." He pauses. "On the other hand, the North Americans go in for cross-training in the Muggle world, and their Minister for Magic has a university degree in international law. _Muggle _international law. She's quite insistent that everything be procedurally correct. Before they broke off with us, she sent Shacklebolt all the materials for a short course on the Nuremberg trials. And then she and the Central European Minister for Magic went off to persuade all the other Ministries to keep us in the outer darkness until we comply."

Hermione says, "Do you think your Gran would be willing to talk with me about it?"

Neville laughs. "Why do you think you have an invitation for the weekend? Oh, and she said to bring your broom. She's been wanting a spot of recreational flying."

"I hope she knows I'm not a world-class flyer."

"I told her about keeping Draco occupied tutoring you. And thanks for that, by the way. I didn't like flying class the first time around, and the idea of _flying lessons with Draco…_"

"Yes, I remember him taking your Remembrall and Harry chasing him down for it. What a nasty piece of work. Frankly, I'm surprised he's as polite as he is to me."

"That's not hard to sort out. He's afraid of you, and he's afraid that you'll walk away. That would cut his weekly flying time in half. And no one else is about to spend any time with him." Neville pauses. "Except for me, and I remind him too much of the things that don't work. And I'm a pureblood with Mugglish habits, and I think that bothers him even more than a Muggle-born at this point."

***


	16. Chapter 16

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

Saturday morning just after dawn, Neville and Hermione walk out through the Hogwarts gates with the tide of Hogsmeade villagers returning to their homes from the full-moon stay inside the castle. They had slept in the Great Hall overnight in transfigured beds. In the morning, they were milling about in the cavernous space, gathering their belongings, children, and household animals.

Neville is nervous of spending a weekend at his Gran's, and he's putting off the moment of Apparition as long as possible, so they keep walking. Along the High Street, they see a small detachment of Aurors gesturing the public away from a stretch of open ground where Hermione spots a trail of blood around something dark red and formless. She overhears some of the Hogsmeade villagers saying, "They shouldn't have stayed behind overnight. It must have breached the gates and then they made the mistake of trying to run for it."

Oh no, the werewolves are real. Quite real. Not just an item on an agenda or a headline in the _Daily Prophet._ She gulps and looks at Neville to see if he's seen; it's not clear, because he has a faraway look in his eyes.

Just outside the Hog's Head pub, Neville offers his arm, tightens his grip on his wand, and they Apparate.

Not to the steps of his Gran's house, but to a slight rise about a mile off. He really doesn't want to be there right away, she thinks. She releases his arm, and they walk in companionable silence.

About halfway there, Neville says, as if continuing a conversation, "She's really not happy about the apprenticeship."

"Why not? It's an honor to be asked, especially before your NEWTs," Hermione says.

"She thinks I should be an Auror like my parents," he says. "I thought I wanted to do that, too, but that was before last year." He frowns. "It didn't help that Ron was going on about it at the birthday party, either." He looks at her. "Thank you, though. You did help me to sort out my reasons."

***

It's still early morning when they arrive at the house, and Hermione can't help the feeling that Neville is doing everything possible to hold off the inevitable confrontation with his Gran. He declines Gran's offer of breakfast since they ate already at Hogwarts, and Gran smiles, shrewdly and far from indulgently.

Hermione can't shake the feeling that she's Neville's bodyguard—well, that's not a new role, is it? The old adversaries were Draco, of course, and then Fred and George Weasley, and Professor Snape. Defending him against his own family is not too different from defending him against his schoolmates or teachers. Though Gran is a few steps more formidable than any of those—no, make that a few steps more formidable than anyone she's met, leaving aside Bellatrix and the Dark Lord.

Gran suggests he might show his guest the house and grounds. Neville nods, with a bit of a gulp. "I'll start with the greenhouses," he says. "Hermione, are you sure you don't want anything to eat?" She has to shake her head again. He's nervous, she can tell. She guesses where some of that childhood plumpness came from—the urge to feed himself, or someone else, in lieu of facing whatever hulked in the background.

The greenhouses at Longbottom House are nearly as extensive as those at Hogwarts. Neville relaxes as soon as he walks in there; that's his home ground. Hermione realizes that she never thought about what sort of family he came from, even though his grandmother was a personal friend of Madam Marchbanks and Madam Bones and more than a few other prominent elder witches.

"There's an old friend here," Neville says, and walks into the next greenhouse, which is lush with tropical plants. A few minutes later, he returns, with his hands cupped in front of him, holding a rather large toad with a complacent expression.

Hermione smiles. "Oh, it's Trevor! I wondered what happened to him," she says. "You didn't have him with you last year."

"No, Gran thought it might be healthier for him here, under the circumstances. Anyway, I don't think he ever accepted the idea of being a _personal_ familiar. If you asked him, I think he'd tell you he was the spirit of the place—_this_ place. He never liked Hogwarts." Neville looks at her. "Not that I was all that keen on that place, either. Or the people, most of them. Present company excepted, of course."

He puts Trevor on his shoulder, from which perch the toad doesn't stir for the remainder of the tour of the greenhouses. She learns that they were built in the mid-nineteenth century by one of Gran's ancestors who practiced both herbology and Muggle botany, and extended by a succession of the builder's descendants who had similar interests. Unsurprisingly, they were Neville's sanctuary as a child, the one place in the vast cold house where he felt at home.

"Plants don't ask you questions all the time," he said. "And they aren't forever comparing you to your parents."

Neville just turned eighteen, and his grandmother is 104 some time this year. So she was eighty-seven when Neville was turned over to her care at age two. Hermione tries to imagine being raised by someone that unreachably old. Her own elderly relatives are actually no more than seventy or eighty, and none of them are as formidable as Mrs. Longbottom.

When they get to the formal drawing room, she's reminded of this again. The deep mantelpiece on the imposing fireplace holds a dizzying variety of mid-Victorian knickknacks—some Muggle and some wizarding—including a simulacrum of a Venomous Tentacula that waves its tendrils and its hungry flowers under a bell jar. (Hermione is rather grateful for the intervening glass). An imposing array of family photographs watches them from the mantelpiece, while tall formal portraits look down from the walls. She isn't sure whether to wave or to drop a curtsy, since the personages in them are nearly as imposing as Gran. She decides on the latter, although she's sure it looks odd given what she's wearing—jeans and walking boots—but as her mum says, better safe than sorry.

Of the pictures on the mantelpiece, most are wizarding photographs. By contrast, Hermione is drawn to the three photographs that don't move. The first is a young man in World War I uniform, looking at the camera with an expression that's simultaneously pleased and solemn. She leans in to look at it. He has a rounded, pleasant face but doesn't look much like Neville. Then there's a family group, the same young man standing with a dark-haired young woman who's holding an elaborately lace-gowned baby. The baby looks at the camera with good-natured curiosity; likely it's neither hungry, nor thirsty, nor needing its nappy changed.

"Gran's first husband," Neville says. "His name was Frank, too, just like my Granddad, so when she tells stories, you have to listen carefully to know which one she means."

Hermione whispers, "So he's the one who was a Muggle."

Neville smiles. "A Muggle who worked in a mill. And it was only ever _other_ people who thought that was a scandal. Gran didn't think so."

"So the baby is your aunt or uncle?"

"If she'd lived, she would have been my Aunt Emily." He drops his voice. "She died at five. Spanish flu. The 1918 epidemic."

Hermione considers. "I didn't know witches and wizards could die from Muggle diseases."

"Who told you that? Automobile accidents and falls from a great height don't usually kill us. But plague, TB, cholera, smallpox, the whole horror house… you can dodge them with potions, but they have to be targeted, just like Muggle drugs. And sometimes the potions don't work."

There's one more Muggle photograph, whose tattered edges and cheap paper contrast with its heavy silver frame. It's a dark-haired young man with aquiline features and a slight but lively smile; he's wearing an open-collared shirt and a loosely knotted cravat or scarf. Hermione guesses him to have been talkative and fond of arguments, though how she drew that conclusion she's not sure. The photograph has the look of a keepsake that was carried in a pocket or billfold for years before being framed.

"Who's he?" she asks. "He looks rather dashing."

Neville smiles conspiratorially. "She won't say, but I suspect he may have been a great lost love. I _think_ his name is Eugene. But don't bother asking her, because she won't tell you. A guess at his name is as much as I've been able to learn in years of eavesdropping."

She turns and looks at him. "So is that a wizarding universal? Eavesdropping on your parents? Or in your case, grandparents?"

Neville smiles. "Oh, I'd imagine it would be a human universal. Otherwise, how can you know what they're are up to?"

She laughs, at least half because she'd never suspected Neville either of stealth or irreverence.

At that moment, the tall double doors of the drawing room open to admit Gran. She nods approvingly at Hermione and tells her that she can continue to look at the pictures, if she likes, while she has a word with Neville. She guesses that this is the conversation he was dreading, because the look he gives her on the way out seems to be trying to memorize something in her face by way of reassurance.

It looks to be a long wait, so she steps away from the mantelpiece to look at the ancestral portraits on the walls. Most are dour eighteenth- or nineteenth-century wizarding paintings, not easily distinguishable from their Muggle counterparts due to the ramrod posture and unnerving stillness of the personages who inhabit them. There's one painting that stands out by sheer contrast—blazes off the wall, in fact—an impressionistic confection of green and gold and cream.

The portrait is unmistakably fin-de-siecle and equally unmistakably the work of John Singer Sargent. The young woman in the painting has dark hair, swept back from her face in the fashion of the 1910s, with silver ornaments glimmering in it. Sumptuous folds of shimmering green descend from a deeply scooped neckline decorated with snake motifs and reminiscent of the regalia of a Cretan goddess. The exuberant brushwork suggests silver embroidery on deeper layers of semi-transparent fabric, with an underlayer of shot silk. The costume is a riot of over-the-top orientalism, the high decadence of the 1910s somehow transported to the Lancashire moors.

The young woman's long fingers toy with a crystal pendant dangling from a fine chain around her neck, and something inside the tiny faceted chamber throws off a single highlight of bright gold. There's a beguiling, mischievous smile on her lips. Her features are sharp-cut, her eyes dark; the fierce aspect of a stooping falcon burns through all of the painter's efforts to gentle her into glamour. You can't look at her without thinking of the wind on the moors, for all the lush promise of the décolletage or the luxury of her regalia.

How did such a wonder come to reside in the gloomy formal drawing room at the Longbottom house?

Hermione looks more closely at the pendant with which the girl in the portrait is playing.

"That's not jewelry," she says to herself, aloud. "It's a vial of Felix Felicis."

The girl in the portrait laughs and gives it a little swing. "Of course!"

Hermione jumps back. "Oh, don't be startled," the portrait-girl says. "It's another of mother's experimental charms." She sighs. "It worked splendidly, but no one was interested."

Hermione says, "What sort of charm?"

"To enchant a Muggle painting into a wizarding one. I _explained_ to mother that witches and wizards don't _like_ impressionism. They're literal-minded and there won't be a knut to be made from this. But she would have this Mr. Sargent in to paint my picture and prove her point." She frowns. "And I already knew what sort of painter he was. Eighty-three sittings for one of his pictures, that little girl and her brother. No wonder the poor little thing was glowering."

"But I sorted him out," she says. "A dab of Felix in his tea each morning, and he was done in no time." She laughs. "Every stroke was just the right one."

Hermione is shocked. "Isn't that illegal?"

"Well, mother was _quite_ put out with me when she found out. She had to Obliviate the poor man so he wouldn't be tormented by the memory of it."

"The memory of what?"

"Painting a picture where nothing was wrong with the mouth."

Hermione laughs. "I know a wizarding painter who's an impressionist."

The girl in the portrait cocks her head. "Oh really? Only after the Muggles have been doing it for at least a hundred years. How did he come by that taste? Is he Muggle-born?"

Hermione says, "No, it's a she, and she's a Pureblood, so far as I know. She's uncommonly fond of Whistler and Turner. We were at Hogwarts together. Luna Lovegood."

The girl shakes her head. "I don't know her. Which House is she?"

"She's a Ravenclaw. But you must have seen her around, if you have a portrait at Hogwarts?"

"Yes, I have, but I'm stuck at the gloomy end of a common room. And the other paintings get quite shirty about me passing through." She smirks. "On the other hand, it might be that I'm shooting through on my broom."

Hermione smiles at the idea of this rather elaborately dressed-up girl rocketing through Hogwarts on a broom. "So your broom must be in your other picture."

"Yes, it's a portrait of my House Quidditch team, so I have a _very_ fine broom. And friends with whom to fly." Her expression brightens with interest. "Do you play Quidditch?"

Hermione shakes her head. "No, I'm just getting comfortable with flying." The girl in the portrait wrinkles her brow, and Hermione feels the need to explain, "I'm Muggle-born, and I didn't have a pleasant experience with flying lessons. And I've had to do rather too much flying in the war. I'm only now getting some… remedial help."

"Well, I hope your tutor is a Quidditch player. You can't really understand flying unless you play Quidditch, you know."

Hermione laughs. "Oh, you sound just like him! He played Seeker on his house team and he's just insufferable on the subject of Quidditch."

The girl makes a moue of distaste. "Oh, _Seekers._ They think the game is all about catching the Snitch." She grins; it's at the far end of mischievous, shading into predatory, which emphasizes her resemblance to a raptor. "There's so much _more_ to it than that. There's strategy. And then there's knocking them off their brooms." Hermione laughs out loud. "Quite improves your prospects—and not just on the pitch. Not that you should accept a marriage proposal from a wizard just because you've knocked him out of the air."

Hermione goggles. "Is that a wizarding custom?"

The girl shrugs flirtatiously, and her ornamental robe slips down her shoulder, making her look rather more like Madam X. "I don't know if it's a _custom_ exactly, but it worked out that way for me. Although it was always the ones I didn't want, arrogant popinjays like Apollonius stupid Malfoy." She mimics a patrician drawl that Hermione knows all too well, "'Emily, my girl, you and I are the best breeding stock in wizarding Britain. It's only logical you should marry me.'"

"So you had Malfoys too."

"It's Hogwarts. You never get rid of them."

***

Neville's first question to Hermione on emerging from his conference with Gran is whether she'd care for something to eat before they set out on their walking tour. She takes one look at the crumpled expression on his face and accepts the offer, even though she's not particularly hungry. Eating will clearly calm him, and it won't hurt to have had an extra bite or two come the six-hour mark. "We can eat in the kitchen," he says. "No point in putting the house-elf to trouble." This last somewhat apologetically.

Gran follows a few minutes later to show Hermione the room she'll be occupying. "We'll be dining at eight o'clock sharp," she says with a glance to Neville, "and I'm hoping you've brought your broom. I've been looking forward to a bit of flying. Settles the digestion after a good meal." Again a significant glance at Neville, which Hermione partially translates as long-standing reproach.

Hermione nods and tells her that she stood the borrowed Nimbus in the entry hall. Gran Summons it and sends it up the stairs ahead of them. "And your bags?" Gran asks. Hermione takes out her blue beaded bag; Gran smiles, a formidable expression—an eagle's smile, she thinks—and says, "Ah yes, they told me you were a dab hand with Charms."

Interesting, she thinks as she descends the front staircase, I'm already thinking of her as Gran rather than Mrs. Longbottom.

In the kitchen is a formidable array of dishes being warmed by bluebell flames. Neville hands her a plate and they serve themselves a second breakfast: buttered eggs, toast, sausage, then sit at the long table to eat. Neville is frowning the whole time as he methodically dispatches the heaped contents of his plate. Clearly whatever is bothering him won't be broached until they're beyond earshot of the house. Hermione applies herself to her food, which is impeccably prepared but heavy.

"This is delicious," she says at length, pushing away the empty plate. "But not one more bite. I have to be able to walk."

Neville smiles at her. "Good. I was hoping the fresh air would help me to feed you up. You're still too thin." She's momentarily surprised at the tenderness of his expression. "And you're still not sleeping well." She remembers with chagrin that she woke him with her screams less than a week ago.

"Sorry about that. About waking you with the nightmare, I mean."

He makes a dismissive gesture with his left hand as he finishes the last bite of sausage. "Not a problem." He looks at her. "You didn't wake me. Or Draco, either, for that matter." There's something else that he almost says, before pushing his plate away.

"None of us are sleeping all that well, I suppose," she says, and remembers that the nightmare wasn't hers at all, really. She's been thinking about it since, and she realizes it contained bits and pieces of various Pensieve memories. That her dream-self was male makes her suspect that it probably goes back to memories she reviewed while Polyjuiced as Draco.

By the time they set off on their walk, it's nearly nine o'clock in the morning. They hike in silence for half an hour. Neville is tense and pensive, which she reads from the vigor of his stride. After the third reminder to slow down a bit, he stops altogether. He apologizes and tells her that he's still thinking over the conference with Gran, and perhaps he'd better tell her about it. If she doesn't mind.

No, she doesn't mind, far from it. She's been eaten up with curiosity, in fact. They start off walking again, this time at a more leisurely pace, as Neville tells the story.

Gran has been talking to Minerva McGonagall about the scheduling for the next sitting of the NEWTs. They're concerned with regularizing educational credentials after the distorted admissions policies of the Thicknesse Ministry, so there will probably be a sitting for the last year's seventh-years who want to opt for the tests early—possibly as early as December—and then another sitting once they've re-opened the school for those who missed the seventh year. It's still uncertain if Hogwarts will be re-opening in the autumn, at least as a school, given that it's currently in use as an orphanage and refugee center.

So the first thing Gran had asked him was which NEWTs he would be sitting. He told her frankly that he hadn't really thought about that, since he'd been more than busy with his current duties. She'd then listed out the NEWTs he would need for Auror training, and that was the point at which he told her that he had no intention of becoming an Auror.

"So that's when the fireworks started," Hermione says.

Neville says that, on reflection, facing down Voldemort was easier. Not that Gran was _that_ much scarier than the Dark Lord, but the whole business with the flaming hat and the snake was unexpected, so he hadn't had time to be apprehensive. With Gran, he'd had a month or so to anticipate the confrontation.

He told Gran that he'd done a full year in the resistance with Dumbledore's Army, not to mention his previous experience in fifth and sixth year, and then there was the Battle of Hogwarts. Bellatrix was safely dead now, and no, he hadn't felt the slightest regret that it had been Molly Weasley who dispatched her. This is real life, not fiction, he'd said, and he was decidedly not a hero from the sagas. He'd more than done his time fighting Dark wizards and had no desire to make a career of it. And even in the state of emergency, he figured that working with the war orphans was vital work. Prevention of future evils, he said.

Gran had persisted, of course, and said that the time was ripe to sign up for Auror training, since the NEWTs were now very much pro forma and that wouldn't be the case once things had settled down. He reminded her that he'd already entered into a formal apprenticeship with Professor Sprout, and it would be very bad form to back out, since there was already more work to be done in the greenhouses than there were trained hands to do it, and greenhouse and grounds work was a large part of the rehabilitation work they were doing with the orphans. And no, he was not willing to have her step in and try to pull strings at the Ministry. He had signed the apprenticeship contract and taken the oath and had no regrets about it.

Gran was still unconvinced, until he told her the story of the attempted lynching.

At that point, she'd said that history did indeed repeat itself, no small thanks to Tom Marvolo Riddle, that Draco had come in for full _collaborateuse_ treatment, poor little devil, and she rather anticipated that this wasn't the end of his troubles, given the other history that the Ministry was set on repeating.

That took him aback because he hadn't said on whom it was the children had laid hands. And she'd known about the killings of the seventh-year Slytherins, too, even though that had been hushed up and they were officially reported as 'missing in action.'

The wizarding world is really a small town, Hermione thinks, at least in Pureblood circles. "So you fought her to a draw," she says.

Neville's still bemused. "It seems so," he says. "For the time being, anyway. Then she changed tack and started talking about marriage alliances."

Hermione frowned. "She wants you to get married?"

"Oh no, not right away. She always says she got married at seventeen and that was far too young. But she wants me to start thinking about the question in general. Start planning." He turns pink. "She listed all of the eligible witches from Order families who are already spoken for, starting with Ginny Weasley. I think she'd had her heart set on an alliance with the Weasleys. She does think very highly of Arthur and Molly."

"So who had she in mind for you?" Hermione feels as if she's stepped back a century or two, into a world of arranged marriages and dynastic alliances.

"Well, she'd had a good list of candidates, she told me, but that was before the war came and everybody started getting married. I think she said her second choice would have been Tonks, because she was an Auror and her father was Muggle-born, and then Fleur Delacour would have been acceptable, too, but Bill Weasley snapped her up."

Hermione tries to imagine Neville with Tonks; it's an interesting idea, but somehow it won't come into focus. And Fleur is an even more inconceivable choice. "She doesn't aim low, does she, your Gran?" she says.

Neville blushes. "Oh no. She tells me I should aim for _my heart's desire_ and not one hair short of that. She says that's what she did, and at the end of the day, she has no regrets. Though in the next breath she tells me that most of the Hogwarts girls of our generation are flibbertigibbets, especially those Patil twins and Lavender Brown, and, not to speak ill of the dead, Pansy Parkinson. And that I ought to watch myself now that I'm officially a Hero of the Battle of Hogwarts, because there are all sorts of girls who want a fling with a hero."

Hermione can't help herself; she starts laughing. "Pansy Parkinson. Oh no, that's so wrong. Deeply wrong. Anyway, wasn't she carrying a torch for Draco?"

Neville sobers immediately. "No, they were friends. Best friends since they were four years old. He cried when he found out what had happened to her." He pauses. "Then he kept me up all night two nights in a row telling me stories about her and Greg Goyle and Vince Crabbe, and all the fun they'd had in Slytherin House before things got bad in sixth year. And he tried to bribe me to sneak him into the Slytherin dorm to pick out a keepsake from her things. He'd have asked her parents, but they were in Azkaban."

"So what did you do?"

"Declined the bribe, of course. I didn't feel right taking payment for something like that." He looks off into the middle distance, then continues, "Anyway, the Headmistress didn't see a problem with it, so she took him in there herself. The doorway on the girls' side wouldn't have let him in with me."

Neville seems less intent on walking fast now; the talking seems to have calmed him. He says, "Then he wanted to bribe me to go down to Hogsmeade and get him some firewhiskey. I turned him down flat, because Madam Pomfrey was very clear that he wasn't to be taking anything but the potions she had prescribed."

Hermione says, "And there's drug interactions to think about. He has no common sense at all." She shakes her head. "To think Harry always assumed Malfoy was some kind of dead-clever conspirator."

Neville said, "Oh, he's too clever by half. He knows rather a lot about potions, and I think he assumed I was too much of a duffer to know what he was asking." He narrows his eyes at the memory. "I told him I wouldn't be implicated in helping him commit idiot's suicide, and he wasn't showing much respect for the effort that had gone into keeping him alive."

She's impressed. "You don't take any prisoners."

"Oh, I did worse. I listed all of his life debts: his mother, Snape, Harry, you, me. Said we would collectively hound him from both sides of the Veil if he even thought about it again." He smiles. "Not to mention Madam Pomfrey, because healers _hate_ to have people die on their watch."

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Sunday 9 August 1998, 1:00am**

I'm not sure what the scariest thing is about Neville's Gran. There's so much to choose from.

I've never had such a keen sense of having to be on alert. Those eyes are not forgiving. What I sense behind them is a century's experience and an encyclopedic grasp of all the human failure she's seen in that time. I watch her watching Neville, and I can hear the squeak of chalk against slate as she marks points lost. It explains his awkwardness as well as his rock-ribbed solidity. If you've spent your life trying your strength against _that —_well, you may as well push against a monolith—then your strength is not as mortal strength, but you're completely unaware of it. And when you say no, you say no like a mountain.

Gran's idea of a relaxing broom ride after dinner is horrifying. I'm going to have to thank Draco for loaning me the better of his two brooms, because even with that _and_ the coaching, it was all I could do to keep up with her. We shot through a winding darkness, sometimes only three or four feet off the ground, over fields, down twisting lanes, and—one scary moment—in between power lines. I don't know what model she's flying, but I suspect it's old enough to qualify for a museum. For all that, she _still_ pulls more power than I can manage with a Nimbus 2001. The experience of flying after her—I won't say with her, because I couldn't quite keep up—manages to combine the worst features of Apparition and being shot out of a cannon. She's a demon for acceleration and hairpin turns, and if she'd been a Muggle I suspect she would have made a formidable fighter pilot.

By the time we got back from our wild ride, it was approaching midnight. Neville was waiting up for us in the front room, dozing a little in an overstuffed chair by the fire. As we came in, I caught a glance at myself in the mirror above the fireplace. My hair was standing on end in an enormous mane, wilder than I'd ever seen it, and my eyes were incredibly bright. On Gran's advice, I'd transfigured my clothes to all black for night flying and applied a Disillisionment Charm. I'd undone the charm but the clothes were still black. The girl in the mirror looked downright witchy, all in black like a night commando, holding that sleek racing broom.

Neville sat up straight when we came in, and his eyes locked on me and darkened—I swear I saw the pupils dilate—and he got this strange little half-smile on his face, as if he'd never seen me before but liked what he saw. And it must have been the effect of the clothes, because I smiled back, and when I caught a mirror glimpse of that smile it scared me a little: it vibrated with presence and power and sex. It felt just like flirting with him at Harry's party while wearing Tonks' clothes. I could feel the field lines of sexual attraction and they ran in both directions. I was intensely aware of the shape of the air between us, how it touched his skin and mine at the same time, how I was breathing the same air as he, and the air molecules tickling my lungs might have previously been in his.

Forget makeup or hair gel or jewelry: the secret of true charisma is hurtling through the air toward the sound barrier and then coming back indoors with a corona of adrenalin radiating off your skin. I caught myself thinking, _if only I'd been better at flying, the war would have been ever so much more fun._ A genuinely perverse thought.

I watched Neville's Gran tuck her hair back into order. I could see the same wildness in her, but her manner is very much more contained. Disciplined. Practiced. She doesn't give herself away, and she'd be a formidable opponent. For the very first time, I wondered what she'd been like when she was young—young like me, just coming into her power.

I'm just now suspecting that the rules of attraction in the wizarding world have more to do with _power_ than with physical beauty. Neville was looking at me tonight the way that men in the Muggle world look at women of supernatural beauty, and I was looking at him and seeing something incandescent. We've known each other since we were eleven, and suddenly we're looking across to undiscovered country.

I suspect that Neville's Gran, in her day, had more than her share of suitors. For all I know, she still does.

And as I was thinking all this, she Summoned the firewhiskey and three tumblers, and we settled down before the fire to talk politics.

***

**Author's note: **Biographical details for Neville's Gran from A. J. Hall. _Lust over Pendle_ and _Dissipation and Despair._


	17. Chapter 17

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

By firelight, Gran's hair recovers its original darkness, and her eyes, like Neville's, seem to absorb the light. The flickering illumination softens the hard lines of her face, and Hermione sees flashes of the girl she might have been when the century was young. The red-gold light catches in the firewhiskey in its heavy tumbler, and Gran's voice has the hypnotic quality of a folk song at a pub fireside in the deep country. There is nothing of the twentieth century in this room, not the twentieth century that Hermione knows, even as Neville's Gran unfolds a tale of doings at the Ministry and Ten Downing Street.

"Yes, we're under sanction from the entire wizarding world," Gran says, "and I'd say well it should be, except that it only makes some of the fools dig in their heels. And the Ministry is a world unto itself. Kingsley is a good lad, but he's a task ahead of him I don't envy."

She takes a considering sip of the firewhiskey, and looks at Hermione. "Our Neville has been telling me what's afoot at Hogwarts, and it's not pretty. I'm coming around to his point of view, that we've got rid of one Tom Riddle and there's a full battalion coming up to replace him." She shakes her head slowly. "Puts me in mind of the Blitz, you know. There's the flashes and bangs, and then there's the unexploded bombs here and there for the next generation."

Hermione says, "Rogue Dementors, and werewolf packs, and an underground lake stocked with Inferi. They still haven't located that, because Harry isn't quite sure where it is."

Gran shakes her head. "The threats aren't only on our side. The Muggle Prime Minister is feeling pressure from his own people. That fool Tom Riddle would cross the border and kill Muggles."

"Not under the purview of the Ministry for Magic. That's the refrain I've been hearing."

"The Muggle Prime Minister isn't happy about the property damage—not a little, either—and killings of _his_ people. The Aurors have turned up some quite nasty things, where the Order didn't get there in time. And Kingsley has been candid with him about it."

Hermione nods and shudders. She's seen the reports, and some but not all of them have gone into the depositions for the trial. That's another of the fights Derwent has had with the War Crimes Commission. The entrenched Purebloods, Umbridge's creatures, are arguing that Muggle killing doesn't come under the scope of the commission, because Muggles are outside the purview of the Ministry for Magic. The atrocities against Muggles and the families of Muggle-borns are being treated as regrettable but isolated incidents, but irrelevant insofar as they do not concern members of the wizarding world.

The Auror reports are ink on parchment for the most part, and only in isolated instances has Derwent been instructed to Pensieve the field Aurors who discovered the scenes of Death Eater atrocities; even more rarely has she been asked to collect memories from the members of the Order of the Phoenix who recall the original incidents, in some cases arriving too late to save the victims. The Order was stretched impossibly thin during its underground resistance phase. Derwent has been stretching her authority to the breaking point in gathering as much information as possible, with the cooperation of sympathetic elements in the Auror Department; as well, Order members have volunteered their recollections. Hermione has been cataloguing the results and abstracting key elements for the database. She's torn between professional indignation that they're not more comprehensive and personal relief that she's not exposed first-hand to more sensory tracks of the recovery of mass graves—by wizarding standards, anyway—whole families killed in what purport to be accidents, but with the marks of torture on them once the remains are un-Transfigured and reassembled.

Gran tells her that Kingsley Shacklebolt has been meeting regularly with the Muggle Prime Minister to relay updates on the identification of the Muggles who were killed by the Death Eaters since the first of August last. It's up to the Muggle Minister and his advisers to come up with explanations for the families of _the disappeared_. It's that locution on Gran's lips that makes her stomach go cold. She remembers the nightmares she had when, at age eight, she spent an afternoon reading the books her mother kept on the high shelves—Amnesty International reports and books on the likely effect of limited nuclear war on the British Isles—horribly compelling narratives of dreadful things, which she couldn't stop reading. With photographs, some of which immediately engraved themselves on her memory.

She remembers the conversation she had with her mother and father when, in the dark watches of the night, they found her sitting up in her bed, crying from sheer terror. They told her why they had those books, and the things that ordinary people could do to hold off such things, and nonetheless that they did happen, had happened over and over again, and that the best one could do was to fight them as soon as they peeped over the horizon.

Gran says, "I'm not liking what I hear, when the Muggle Minister is using words like 'terrorist minority' and 'danger to public safety.' Not a good sign at all, no. If it turns..." The hairs go up on the back of Hermione's neck, as she feels the presence of deep time in the room. "We've good will here in Lancashire, looked after our people in the late nastiness, and that might save us. But I won't speak for London or Hogwarts. They've the means, you know, and enough Muggle-borns on the other side of the border to tell them what they need. Not to mention what Kingsley has had to tell them. Mass _Obliviates_ are out of the question, and in any case the Aurors haven't the staff to do them." She smiles, and it's the rictus of a death's-head. "The Muggles could find Hogwarts, you know, close enough to wipe it out. I saw in the Blitz that magic is no match for blockbusters, and they've made some progress since then."

Gran turns her firewhiskey tumbler and momentarily stares into its depths; Hermione imagines that her dark sybil's eyes are scrying anew the Time of the Burning, as the reflected firelight flares in the glass and shimmers in the liquid inside.

"And we've not had much gumption on the Squib problem." Hermione remembers the caretaker Filch and his obsession with torturing wizard children and shivers.

"Either they're our children or they're a fifth column." Hermione's eyes flicker to Neville, who's staring into the flames with his old look of resignation, and she realizes that it's him that Gran is discussing. "I've had that fight all my life. If we're not going to kill them at age three and bury them in the rose garden, then we give them the means to live as Muggles. Happily, if possible. Because it won't do just to set the wards to kill them if they trespass as adults. That didn't save us from Matthew Hopkirk."

Hermione remembers the name from the historical records. "The Vengeful Squib."

"Vengeful indeed—the Muggles appointed him Witch-finder General, though they know him under another name. Started with his own family and worked outward from there. Took not a few Muggles with them, but who's counting when scores are being settled?"

Hermione steadies her hand on her glass, which has begun to shake uncontrollably. "So… do they still kill Squibs?"

Gran looks at her for a long moment. "That's a _family matter._ Some old Pureblood lines still enforce it in the marriage contract. The Misses Black that were, would have sworn in blood that they'd do their duty by their husbands' Houses." She smiles bitterly. "Then there's the hypocrites that gossip out of one side of their mouth about the Lestranges and the Malfoys, but arrange convenient accidents when a child of theirs proves a Squib."

Hermione has the icy conviction she's just waded into the Longbottom family's heart of darkness, in the person of great-uncle Algie. Hearing Neville tell the tale, she's always pictured Algie as a comic walrus-moustached elder with a thick northern accent, like Neville more than a little clumsy and absent-minded—else how could he have reached for a pastry and lost his grip on a little boy poised over a precipitous drop? Never before had she thought to put the absent-minded Uncle Algie in the same frame with the cold-eyed malice of Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange.

She looks down, and then says, "Mrs. Longbottom, may I ask your opinion?"

Gran looks at her levelly and nods.

"How safe will my parents be when I bring them back?"

"Safer than you, I'd warrant," Gran says. "Though there's no predicting that, of course."

That answer chills her yet deeper and makes her grateful for the fortifications she's built around their home. She wishes she had someone she could ask to have a look at what she's done.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Sunday 9 August 1998 1:30am**

Now I'm confused. And it's not just the glass of firewhiskey I consumed by Gran's fireside tonight.

I thought I understood this whole pureblood business, but I realize that I was looking at too small a sample. The Black family (well, the ones who remain on the tapestry, anyway) are mad for blood purity and have dabbled in the Dark Arts. The same, I gather, for the Malfoys.

The Longbottoms don't practice the Dark Arts, but Gran hints they've practiced a sly and underhanded sort of evil in their time.

The Weasleys are all for Muggle protection but they're as intensely clannish as any of the others, and a Muggle-born is a bit much to take into the family. So I understand from the long silence since Ron and I broke up. I'm still not sure if the indignation about my name in the paper came from Ron or from Molly.

No. I don't want to go down that path right now, because I'm already not feeling good. Gran's discussion of the danger from the Muggles and the Squibs has given me a deep chill that August cannot warm. I already have too many images from the Pensieve depositions and I don't want to think about how many steps will take me from the Death Eaters to warm-hearted Molly Weasley. (Did Molly birth any Squibs in her time? And had she, what would have happened to them?)

And there's a personal piece, too, a bit closer to home: the question of Pureblood kinship networks, and how I might fit into that picture.

I'm trying to puzzle out what Neville told me about his Gran's list of marriageable witches. Ginny Weasley was in first place, followed by Tonks, with Fleur bringing up the rear. Gran has always had good words to say about the Weasleys, from the first moment I met her. They're Order stalwarts, have been since the last round, and purebloods. As is Gran, although Neville just told me that she had a half-blood child, not by a Muggle-born wizard but an actual Muggle, which boggles the mind.

Whatever the kinship principle is here, it's not blood status as defined by Dolores Umbridge and her lot. Ginny's a pureblood, but Tonks was a half-blood and Fleur is too—her mother's Veela or half-Veela. Some of it's political or professional, I think. Mad-eye Moody was Frank Longbottom's colleague and Tonks was his protégée, so that makes her practically family already, and Gran wanted Neville to be an Auror. And she specifically mentioned Tonks' Muggle-born father as a plus—maybe as a sign of political reliability?

Fleur… well, I don't know the politics there, but she was certainly in the Order this time. I wonder what her parents were doing in the last war, or her grandparents in the war with Grindelwald—which I understand was mostly a Continental affair. She was a Tri-Wizard Tournament champion, and definitely a witch of considerable valor.

Valor… well, that could be it. All three of them had it in quantity, and Ginny, in fact, verges on the ferocious on occasion. This world has been at war for generations, and a solicitous grandmother might want to secure her gentle grandson's safety by marrying him to a warrior, especially if she still cherished hopes of making him an Auror like his parents.

Actually, I'm getting depressed thinking about this. And it's not just the chilly heights of realpolitik, but personal—another touch of December at the bone. I'm not part of any of those networks. I've come late to the story, centuries late. My parents are _dentists._ I don't have a family tree to speak of, unless there was somebody way back there in the mists of time, and if there were, I don't know about them. Nobody's yet given me any kind of explanation of how this works genetically, so I may as well say I wandered into Diagon Alley out of the primal forest.

Neville's Gran is telling him to start thinking about whom he might marry.

All right, I'm jealous. Not depressed, but jealous. I'm not on that list.

I'm not interested in getting married. That's why Ron and I broke off—well, one among many reasons. So why am I upset to be absent from a list of marriage candidates? That's as stupid as getting upset about the idiot M-word. Yes, I'm left out, and I may as well get upset that I'm deprived of the opportunity of marrying Draco Malfoy. (Ew. Wash out the inside of your head for that thought.) I'm in this world but not of it. But that's not what troubles me, if I'm to be honest.

No, it's that Neville and I were eyeing each other tonight, starting with my return from the flight with Gran and continuing through the firewhiskey and politics.

Which is saying something, given how much attention Gran commands when she's telling stories. There were the grim bits, the ones keeping me awake just now, and then there's the fascination of sitting at the fireside with a witch who remembers not only Hitler and Grindelwald, but Queen Victoria and the young Albus Dumbledore. Her perspective is local, specifically Lancashire, and mordant in a way I'm coming to associate with deep and not always happy knowledge.

Neville's Gran knows almost as much about wizarding technology as Percy Weasley. She told me that the Floo Network and the Owl Post were the First Industrial Revolution adapted to the wizarding world, and what I'm engaged in is the Second. And she's authentically funny about the weirdness of this place: how witches and wizards borrow things from the Muggles and then get it wildly, weirdly, willfully wrong. She knows about Arthur Weasley's plug collection and she thinks it's uproariously funny. On a grimmer note, she's dead convinced that Tom Riddle aka Voldemort did in fact read the Muggle papers as a young adolescent and nicked some of his nastiest ideas from one Adolf Hitler—not only the bright idea of a Final Solution, but the emphasis on females as breeding stock.

"Some of our lot borrowed that notion, too," she says. "That's the difficulty with letting your enemy choose the ground." She doesn't name names but I swear she's talking about Molly Weasley.

And she blames Riddle for hijacking Slytherin House as a vehicle for his own purposes. Which is why she didn't want "our Neville" marrying Pansy Parkinson. Slytherin witches aren't what they were in _her_ day, that much she knows for certain.

I remembered Pansy calling Neville a fat little crybaby, and shook my head. Again. Stared into the depths of my drink and wondered if it was going to my head by osmosis, especially when I looked up and met Neville's eyes and found them locked on me again. He'd been looking at me all that time. By firelight his eyes were dark—no distinction between pupil and iris—and I noticed for the first time how long his lashes are.

Experimentally, I kept looking. He didn't look away. He was sipping his drink very, very slowly and looking at me over the rim of the glass. The flicker of firelight lit him in red and gold, and I found myself looking at his lips and his hands, and the way his shaggy hair curled over his brow and neck.

I know what I'm thinking when my eyes drift like that.

I also remember how many years I looked at Ron, and just the act of looking reminded me of my ancient frustration. Sixth year especially, willing Ron to notice that I was looking at him with interest. I would have been better off listening to Harry's paranoid rants about what Malfoy was up to. Maybe if I'd spent more energy on skulking about with Harry than pining over Ron, we might have cut that nonsense off at the pass. Except that Harry was making me crazy cheating out of that Potions book of Snape's and beating me in Potions class with improved recipes that nobody else in the class had.

Sixth year really stank. Even if we leave out of it the amount of time that Ron spent snogging with Lavender.

So I'm not ready to start pining over Neville. And even if I did, he's a hero now, and I did hear him quoting Gran's warning about girls who want to have a fling with a hero. With that thought, I took an extra-large mouthful of the firewhiskey and more or less bolted it, with the expectable result.

Gran said, "Eh, lass, that's not water." I nodded, tears in my eyes, waiting for the conflagration in my sinuses to die down, though I was quite pleased with how fast it numbed my urge to feel sorry for myself. Good thing I don't touch this stuff at home.

To bed, then. We're up early for another long walk, though Neville tells me we might cheat a bit with some strategic Apparition if we get a late start.

***


	18. Chapter 18

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Monday 10 August 1998**

The next morning, before we set off, I had a look at Malfoy's broom. It didn't look right, and Neville thought something might be amiss as well, not that he was an expert on brooms. Certainly it didn't have the same profile as it had when I set out on the mad flight with his Gran, which was worrying, because it wasn't my broom.

I shuddered to think about what it would cost to replace… well, that would be another black market currency transaction. It would have to be. I was already thinking about how many pieces into which to split the transaction so that it would pass under the radar at Gringotts, and how big a dent it would put in my savings in the Muggle world.

I put that aside, though, because we were going to take another nice long walk—the last opportunity for a while, with grouse hunting season opening in a few days—and when I looked at Neville, I saw a faint flicker of that glow from the night before. It still felt odd; after all, it had only been two months since I'd broken up with Ron.

I'd never expected to be attracted to Neville, of all people.

***

Nor had I expected to have an argument with Neville, of all people, and I didn't expect it would be outside a Muggle pub in Lancashire, homeward bound from our long walk.

What had I expected? A long, friendly walk, fresh air and birdsong and the very occasional botanical or cultural side note from Neville, a nice rest on the return trip and a relaxing conversation over pints at one or another of the local pubs he knew so well. For the most part, that was exactly what it had been, and I was feeling the good effects of it all as we came in sight of the pub.

Neville said, "Dean told me you had a job now. A Muggle job."

I had no idea Neville and Dean had talked, but I said yes, that was true.

He frowned. "So how did you do that? I thought you were working at the Ministry."

"I am. McGonagall helped me out with some details," I said.

Neville looked at me and I could tell from his expression that he knew I'd just closed the subject of _what_ McGonagall had done, not that he couldn't guess. He said, "I didn't mean on our side of the border. You don't even have A-levels. How did you come to be doing computer consulting?"

I shrugged. "I know how to do the work. And what I don't know, I teach myself."

He stopped dead still, and took my arm. Then instead of going into the pub, he walked me a few meters away, and we stood with our backs to the pub and facing the stretch of open ground where they land the rescue helicopters. Presumably he didn't want to take the chance of being overheard.

He looked at me and said, "Hermione." I could translate that well enough: _Come off it, I know what tricks you've gotten up to in past. What did you do this time? _For someone who usually doesn't talk much, Neville knows how to make himself understood. And it's curiously attractive to talk to someone who'll actually ask for the details.

"Some database diddling," I said, "and a few memory charms." I thought I was being charmingly modest, considering the amount of work I'd actually done, only my expression apparently didn't read as sufficiently demure.

"_A few memory charms," _Neville said. "You know, I don't trust you at all when you've got that smirk on like Draco Malfoy's long-lost sister."

"Additive, not subtractive," I said. "I know how you feel about _Obliviate_ and I'm of much the same mind." He looked at me with the expression I'm coming to think of as Easter Island Stone God. Utterly implacable. I started to get annoyed, and the comparison to Malfoy didn't help matters. "Look, it's all well and good for you to disapprove, but I have to make a living. In both worlds."

"So you think it's all right to go about modifying memories?"

"Look, I didn't _hurt_ them. I just added myself in."

"We're not supposed to be interfering at all. It's high-handed and arrogant."

"No one's going to know," I said.

"That's not the _point,_" he said. "You're just stepping in like some god off Olympus and messing about with people's heads. It's not right." He paused to take a breath. "I like you, but sometimes you scare me. When you're so sure that you're right, there's no limit to what you'll do."

"You're talking to me as if I'm the next Dark Lord," I said.

He looked at me speculatively, and didn't say anything at all. Finally he asked, "So you know more about this than I do. How did Riddle get his start?"

And I remembered that the late Dark Lord was in fact a dab hand with memory charms, not least to cover his tracks. "Killing small animals and tormenting children," I said. After a long pause, I added, "And memory charms. Both kinds."

The Stone God expression modified enough to allow for a certain smugness, that is, if monoliths are allowed to look smug. And that's when I got angry.

"You know what? There are days I feel some sympathy for the bastard. He came in here as an outsider. He wasn't welcome here, and I haven't been either. Nobody is offering me an apprenticeship, or begging me to join the Aurors. I have a strictly time limited job at the Ministry that's going to end when they get the war crimes sorted out, and Gringotts takes every knut of what I make. I don't get to leave until I've paid that debt, but nobody is making any noises about how they'd love me to stay. And meanwhile I have to listen to preaching about how I'm not a nice girl. Well, if I _were_ a nice girl I would have been dead a long time by now."

"Hermione, if you needed money in the Muggle world, why didn't you just hack into a bank and do a transfer?" Neville asked.

I stared at him. "That would be stealing!"

He looked at me and his lips quirked as if he were trying not to smile.

I added, "All I wanted was a chance to do some honest work that would pay decently."

That's when Neville started laughing. At first it was a smothered snort and then it escaped and he was laughing in earnest and couldn't stop, and finally he was doubled over trying not to howl, and I saw tears running down his face. Eventually he straightened up and took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes and cheeks and looked at me with a helplessly apologetic glance that would have been a lot more convincing if he still hadn't been wrestling with the occasional stray giggle.

_First he accuses me of being Lord Voldemort's baby sister and then he laughs at me. Laughs at me._ _I'm being laughed at by Neville Longbottom._ I folded my arms over my chest and glared at him.

He said, "Hermione, you are a sterling product of the English middle classes." And he started to laugh again. "How many rules did you break so that you would look law-abiding?"

That's when I lost my temper and said what I shouldn't.

"I don't think you understood what I said. I'm well and truly stuck. I'm dead broke in this world, not a knut to my name. There's my parents' house to take care of, there are _taxes_ to pay, and utilities, and they aren't going to be Apparating home, even once the Ministry lets me go get them…" Thinking about them, the tears were already burning in my eyes, and I was not going to cry in front of Neville. "I had to play games with money just to get Harry a present…"

Neville stopped laughing entirely and his face went white. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I got someone to change the money for me at Gringotts, and we bought the present…"

Neville said, "Don't tell anyone else what you just told me, or it will be you _and_ Dean they find in pieces." How had he known it was Dean? Unless it was Dean who'd given him the other piece of it… oh _gods,_ I was feeling sick to my stomach, and angry on top of that, because I hadn't known any of this. No one had seen fit to tell me.

He took a good look at my face, and continued, "The Goblins don't have a sense of humor about money matters. I overheard a story Gran told about someone who did what you just did and got caught, and it gave me nightmares for years." He shuddered involuntarily and quoted what I assumed was the punch line, "_And some of the bits were still twitching when they buried them._" He added, "And from the sound of it, you're already on their list, _prominently._"

All I could think of just then was our conversation that morning about the borrowed broom I'd just wrecked. The very expensive borrowed broom. "Oh _shit,_ Malfoy's broom."

"Don't even think about it," he said. "It's not worth the risk. I'll make it up to him, if it comes to that."

"No," I said, "I'll handle it. I'm tired of being at everyone's mercy, and I already owe you too much as it is."

He actually looked hurt. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"June. The plant you got for me at the greenhouses. You know what that was for. Mrs. Weasley refused to let me take any from her garden, and Ron was being… not understanding. You were my last resort."

He turned bright red, and nodded. Just the conversation I didn't want to have with him in the first place. It's none of his damned business if I have—well, _had_—a sex life, and that's what I just admitted to, because nobody takes the Vile Purple Potion for kicks. It tastes too nasty for that, not to mention the side effects. I'm only continuing it now because I daren't take chances; I don't know the details of the Goblins' rules about offspring-as-collateral, and conception may be as good as birth in their books. To compound the embarrassment, I was guessing that sex is not something that Neville knows about… well, other than theoretically. There was enough of last night's attraction left for me to feel a frisson at the idea of _Neville_ and _sex_ in the same thought, but the embarrassment pretty much swamped that.

"You don't owe me for that," he said.

"I don't intend to owe anybody for anything," I said. "And I'm tired of hearing about what I should or shouldn't have done. It's not as if anybody told me about anything when it would have done me any good. I didn't even learn about bloody _nursery tales_ until last year, and that was only because it was Dumbledore's secret coded message to the lot of us…" I stopped myself before I started ranting about Dumbledore and his precious Hallows, because I wasn't supposed to be talking to Neville about that, or to anybody, for that matter.

"I hate this place, and I'm stuck here. I don't get my parents back until the Australian Ministry is convinced that we're over this Voldemort business, so I sit on the War Crimes Commission, and the Purebloods stare at me like the Mudblood I bloody well am. And if it weren't for that lot, I wouldn't have had to send them away in the first place." I stopped to swallow the tears, which was useless because they came back as soon as I started talking again, "And Derwent did give me the horrid details. If it turns out I didn't do it all _absolutely right,_ they could be… like your parents. Which would be a fine kettle of fish, wouldn't it? I'd have done to them what Bellatrix would have done… just without the pain." The tears were running down my face, and I was trying not to sob. "And they trusted me, and they said yes to it."

Neville looked at me gravely and then rummaged in his pocket. He handed me a clean handkerchief. I wiped my face and blew my nose and then took a discreet look around before I pulled out the wand and did a _Scourgify_ on the handkerchief so I could give it back to him. He shook his head. "Keep it," he said.

I felt angry and ashamed that he was seeing me like this. "_In theory_, you're right about the memory charms," I said, "except I don't see a way out of it in either case. No one was helping me with my parents, and no one was offering to help me cross the border."

He said, "You never asked for help."

That stopped me cold. "What do you mean, I never asked? Who was going to help me?"

"Gran has always thought very highly of you."

That shocked me beyond words. "I don't know her well enough."

Neville took a step closer to me and said in a hissing whisper, "It was a war, not a bloody _tea party._ You could have asked, but you didn't." A tiny detached piece of my brain wondered why he hadn't cast _Muffliato_ instead of whispering like that_._ A Pureblood wizard with Mugglish ways, that was what he'd called himself, and rightly enough.

"I didn't know…" What hadn't I known? That Gran was a power? Well, that, yes, and that Neville or his family would have done that for me. That _Purebloods_ would have done that for me. Well, the Weasleys had done as much as they could, circumstances allowing, and they were Purebloods, but that was different.

"Different how?" Neville asked, and I realized that I'd said some part of that aloud.

"Because I'm Ron's friend, and Harry's," I said. "Or rather, I was." I hadn't realized just how angry I was at the two of them until the next part came out of my mouth. "I know I'm just a freak in this world, and everybody lets me know it too. Except I was a _useful_ freak, and now that I'm not useful any more, they can just stop talking to me. Look at what happened at the birthday party, and Harry didn't say a word. I have a good guess who broke my nose." Neville nodded, and I remembered the other part. "I certainly know who repaired it," I said, "and Ron made a big stink about it after you left, as if he had any right after he laughed at me…"

"I don't think they've treated you very well," he said. "And I don't think you're a freak." He took my hand, the one that wasn't holding his handkerchief, and said, "Do you know what I wanted more than anything else? To be a Muggle. Not a Squib, mind you, a Muggle. Just an ordinary, _normal_ human being who'd never had anything to do with magic. They kept wanting me to be something else, Uncle Algie and Aunt Enid and Gran, not to mention all the family portraits. They all remembered my parents. I don't remember them, not the way they were, before…" I could see the tears standing in his eyes. He said, "The day I got my Hogwarts letter, I felt sick. Not to mention scared out of my mind, because I knew what had happened to my parents, and by all accounts I wasn't half what they'd been. Everybody I met at Hogwarts seemed to agree, except for you."

"I couldn't stand the way people treated you. It wasn't right. Especially Snape, because he was an adult and should have known better."

He changed the subject. "You're working a Muggle job... why?"

"I told you why. For the money."

"You talked about crossing the border. And you've faked up a whole Muggle background for yourself."

"Look, don't start again about the memory charms. If I wanted to cross back into the Muggle world and do it honestly, I have _years_ of education to make up. I'm self-taught in _everything._ There are _huge_ holes. They never taught us anything useful at Hogwarts. I'll never be even half of what I could have been if I'd just been an ordinary Muggle. I'd be going to university this year…" That other world, unreachable, struck me now as something infinitely desirable and infinitely far away. "I did what I had to do to be able to get a job _now._ And I'm still learning the things I need. Everything I've done in this place has been self-defense, for me or mine." I looked at him very seriously and added, "And I've always thought of you as one of mine, Neville."

He said, "I know. And I've been grateful, very. You were one of the people who made me stop feeling afraid. You and Remus Lupin." He paused and looked at me. "I never realized how scared _you_ were. You always looked so powerful."

I must have glared at him, because he added, "No, I said that wrong. You _are_ powerful. You just don't see it. You solve the problem, and move on. You put Umbridge out of commission for _months._" He squeezed my hand, and said, "Hermione, will you promise me that you won't do that again with the memory charms? Please? It _really_ bothers me, and I know you thought you had good reasons, but it really isn't right."

His tone was pleading, and my conscience knew I was in the wrong, but I wasn't ready to let it go. "So, are you asking for my word as a prospective Dark Lord?"

"No. I'm asking you for your word as my friend. Because I've _always_ been able to depend on that." He added, "And you're wrong that no one wants you to stay. _I_ do. And if you need help, you only have to ask. I know it's not easy for you to ask. It's always been other people asking you for help."

"All right," I said. "There is something you can do for me. Look after Crookshanks for me." I whispered, "I'm still having problems with wild magic in my sleep, and I don't want to hurt him."

"That wouldn't be a problem." He put his arm around me, which didn't mean quite what it had back in May at St. Mungo's. It felt friendly and warm, that's true, but there was a surge of _something else, _on my part at least: awareness of his body, on the other side of the warm air that separated us, and the urge to put my own arm around him and pull him even closer.

All of which I resisted, remembering that I wasn't on the approved list. Ginny and Tonks and Fleur, yes. Me, no. I was Neville's school friend, toward whom his Gran felt _regard._

He added, "Is there anything else that's worrying you?"

"No," I lied, and then offered another sacrificial piece of truth, because I could tell he knew I was lying, "Other than worrying about doing the Killing Curse for real this time and being sent to Azkaban for life. I ought to ask Derwent to bring me along on her next tour of inspection, but I'm afraid that it will be even worse than the nightmares." I offered him the handkerchief. "Here, you can have this back." I was already feeling ashamed of crying in front of him.

"No, keep it." He smiled down at me and added, "As a token of your pledge."

I returned the smile and said, "Neville, I had no idea you were so _medieval._"

He said, "Let's go have a pint. It's been a long day and I remember you liked that ale last time."

***

Last night, Sunday, brought the end of the weekend; after saying our goodbyes with Neville's Gran, we Apparated to Hogsmeade and hiked up to the castle just before sunset. My first order of business was to talk to Malfoy about the broom and get confirmation of my dreadful conviction that I had wrecked it. I wasn't happy about this, not at all, but I thought I may as well get it over with. I dropped my things on the bed in my own room and then walked down the hall to the door next to Neville's. I waited a full minute before knocking. _This isn't going to be fun, _I thought.

My first thought as he was opening the door was how thin and pale he was, _of course,_ since I'd been looking at Neville all weekend. The grey eyes looked unnatural.

"Malfoy, I had a question about the broom." I held it out to him. "The shape looks different. Is it all right?"

He took it in both hands and looked at it, then sat down and started handling the twigs. "No, it's not all right, Granger. What have you been _doing_ with this broom?"

"Flying," I said. "I didn't think I bumped into anything in the dark, though."

"In the dark?" He took a box off the shelf and searched inside it, one-handed, while securing the bundled twigs in the other. He found what he sought—a silver tool I recognized, because Harry's broom servicing kit has something like it. "You were flying in the dark?"

"Well, it was a Muggle district, so we had to."

He was working over the twigs in the tail of the broom, tweaking the angle on each one and then tightening the fittings. I watched his hands. He looked up, raised one eyebrow. "Let me understand this, Granger. You were flying in the dark, in a Muggle district—and just how fast were you going?"

"I don't know," I said. "The stupid thing doesn't come with a speedometer." He looked blank. "Never mind, Muggle stuff. How am I supposed to know how fast I was going? I was just trying to keep up." That got me another raised eyebrow. He finished the work on the broom, tightened the last fitting, and put the kit away.

He handed me the broom.

"Whatever you did, you pushed it to the limits," he said. "And if you make a habit of it, I'm going to teach you to service the thing yourself." The tone was snide, but I had the oddest feeling that I'd just received a compliment. I was giddy with relief that I was not going to have to do any more illegal transactions, in particularly that I was not going to have to risk the wrath of the Goblins over a debt to Malfoy of all people.

***


	19. Chapter 19

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Saturday 30 August 1998 2:45am**

Saturday. Saturday night and I'm still shaking.

Tried sleeping earlier but it doesn't help. I'm curled into the covers and I'm still shaking. Madam Pomfrey dosed us all with chocolate as soon as we got back to the castle. And everyone assured me that I handled it properly.

Except I can't sleep. And I'm not sure I want to, because I think I know where I will go once I do manage to drop off. I'll be back in that room again, with Bellatrix and her knife and the shadowy watchers. I don't want to go back there.

Hogsmeade. Full daylight. And I thought things had settled down.

Three of us, and the two Aurors who accompany us everywhere. Well, let's be precise. Neville and I can go where we like, but it was Neville's idea to bring Draco along on our visit to Hogsmeade. So it was on his account that we had the two Aurors. And we were just coming up on Honeydukes, if I recall correctly, because Neville and Draco were having a thoroughly inconsequential argument about sweets, specifically their favorites when they'd been eleven, and whether the Every Flavor Beans were worth the risk of the nasty-tasting ones. A really stupid conversation, which was pleasant only because Draco is much less of a prat than he used to be.

I was looking in the windows at Honeydukes and thinking about how sugar quills had been very amusing when I was eleven, but at eighteen, sweets weren't distraction enough to really interest me. I'd really rather a nice treatise on Arithmancy or for that matter, security algorithms. Books were, I supposed, sweets for the brain. In any case, there was the humiliating fact that even if I wanted a sugar quill, I didn't have any money to buy one.

And just in the middle of my free-association about my favorite flavors of brain confectionery, the afternoon darkened and chilled. I looked up to see if clouds were crossing the sun. Wrapped arms around myself, and then realized that the chill wasn't outside but inside. It deepened, and then I heard Bellatrix again…

_No_, I said to myself, _here and now. Breathe. You're not having a flashback in the middle of Hogsmeade. You are standing in front of Honeydukes and you're going to breathe and listen to Draco's stupid patter about jelly beans. _

Except he had fallen entirely silent, and so had Neville.

I turned around and looked up and there they were. They. A phalanx. Six of them at least, hooded with the dread faceless faces in shadow. Dementors. In the middle of Hogsmeade.

It was like a bad dream. The Dementors were advancing, and no one was moving. The two Aurors were frozen in place too. Not that you can outrun Dementors anyway…

I hoped I could still manage it.

My happiest memory. Wand out. _Expecto patronum!_

My happiest memory is still the Hogwarts letter, and the cat that came up the front walk of my parents' modest bungalow and inexplicably before my eyes turned into a thin woman in a tall peaked hat. The letter that landed me where I am now. I concentrated on the parchment, and the seal, and the moment I saw that tabby cat turn into Minerva McGonagall: the moment, before anyone said a word, that I knew I wasn't alone.

Six of them, shadows blocking out the sun, and more of them behind. Neville had his wand out, but all he was getting was a fuzzy glow at the tip, and his Patronus clearly wasn't taking shape. The six hooded shadows were advancing on us, and with them the bone-deep chill of despair.

No, more than six. There were seven or eight in the next rank—where did they come from? And Draco was frozen in place in front of me and Neville. I didn't need to see his face to know the expression on it. The hooded figures advanced. He was just standing there—within arm's reach of them. _Ahead of us_, the fool. Neville was concentrating on his Patronus, which still refused to take shape…

"Get behind me!" I hissed at Draco. He didn't move. I grabbed his elbow and swung him behind me. I heard a little rasping grunt, the breath knocked out of him as he hit the window glass and bounced off. "And stay there. I'll sort this." With more confidence than I felt.

_Full concentration now. No, Bellatrix isn't real. Think about that letter, which is real—I am here, after all, aren't I? Sense memories: the wax seal with the four colors of the Hogwarts crest, the green ink in calligraphic loops. Think about the noise it made when I opened it, and the growing elation that_ _magic was real _…

… and the otter sprang from the wand tip, glowing white and trailing stars, frolicked in among the shadows as if it were splashing in water—and then continued on up to Hogwarts Castle, bearing my urgent message to Headmistress McGonagall.

The Dementors dispersed.

I was shaking. (I'm still shaking.)

It took both me and Neville to get Draco to his feet. He was sitting on the ground, knees up, his hands over his face. Teeth chattering, because I could hear it in the first words he tried to get out. Neville told him not to worry about talking.

The Aurors escorted us back to the castle quick-march. Neither of them, apparently, could cast a Patronus.

So the amateur, the kid, saves the day again. No, I'm not feeling particularly cocky just now. I'm feeling sick. More so after the Headmistress came to the hospital wing to take me to her office so that I could speak with the Minister for Magic directly. No one authorized those Dementors to be in Hogsmeade. They were there on their own. Rogue Dementors. One thing when they're an agenda item in a meeting and quite another when you're staring them down in front of Honeydukes.

When I came back to the hospital wing, Neville was still there, sitting on the bed next to Draco, who was curled into a ball, shaking. Neville was saying, "It's all right, it's all right," with his hand on Draco's back, stroking between the shoulder blades, stroking down the spine, in time to the reassuring words that were having no effect whatsoever. He nodded to me and I sat down on the other side of the bed and said, "It's all right. The Minister knows about this, and they can't get into Hogwarts."

It was twenty minutes before we could get him to relax enough to take the chocolate that Madam Pomfrey had brought. It was another hour before he stopped shaking and could stand without his legs collapsing under him.

Which has given me a healthy respect for his worst memory.

***

The Dementor incident put out of her mind what had happened earlier, which was just as bad in its way.

Neville, poor forgetful Neville, had remembered that he had something to tell Professor Sprout, and doubled back to put his head into the Three Broomsticks to see if she might be on the premises. Draco followed him, shadow-wise, and with him the Aurors, and Hermione in their wake.

Madam Rosmerta saw Draco and went dead white. Of course, of course—and she cursed herself for forgetting what she already knew, that he'd put her under Imperius for months. Made her poison her own good mead in the hopes that the bottle sent to Slughorn would find its way to Dumbledore, and made her hand off to a student—one of her favorite clientele—a cursed necklace. It was pure luck that the necklace hadn't killed Katie Bell when it slipped out of its wrapping. (Not only was he a failure as an assassin, he was pants at wrapping parcels.)

Very deliberately, Rosmerta said to her and Neville, "We don't serve Death Eaters here. You are welcome here, but _that_ is not." As if she and Neville were the only _people_ there, and there were some spot of unmentionable filth on the floor that she was far too well-brought-up to look at.

Hermione pushed Draco toward Neville and hissed to Neville to get him out of there—_now_. Neville looked nearly as stricken as Rosmerta as he took Draco's arm and hustled him out.

She said, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

Madam Rosmerta looked at her with that implacable white mask of a face. And then, to Hermione's tremendous shock, it crumbled and tears began to run down Rosmerta's cheeks; she turned and hid her face and her shoulders shuddered.

_Damn Neville. Damn all of us. We gave the poor woman a flashback. A pretty major one, by the look of it. _

Later, Neville told her it had been twenty minutes, but it seemed hours that she sat while Rosmerta cried. Luckily no one came into the pub or she would have been hard put to decide whether to chase them out or to serve the drinks herself. It was a beautiful afternoon, so maybe the strollers in Hogsmeade preferred fresh air to a butterbeer or firewhiskey.

When Rosmerta looked up and saw that Hermione was still there, she frowned. Hermione said, "I didn't want to leave until you were all right."

Rosmerta said, "I don't think I'll ever be right again. Not after that."

Hermione apologized again for letting Draco walk in there, and assured her that she would be quite sure that the ban was enforced, and so would Neville. Then she took out the leaflets that Derwent had given her on the off chance that she met anyone who'd been under Imperius. She said, "There's a reason they call them the Unforgivables."

Rosmerta looked at her. "You would know, wouldn't you." A pause, during which Hermione imagined that Rosmerta was considering whether it was respectful to specify. "I saw it in the _Prophet._ About how you were kept _there._" She adds, with feeling, "I don't know how you can keep company with _that._"

Hermione simplified it, "Orders from the Headmistress." She pushed the leaflet across the table toward Rosmerta. "I thought you might want this."

Rosmerta picked up the leaflet and peered at the name printed at the bottom. "That's the woman they interviewed, isn't it? When the late Minister…" She didn't finish the sentence: _killed himself. _

Hermione said, "Healer Derwent. I'm seeing her myself. She's very good. They've learned quite a lot about treating the aftermath of Imperius and Cruciatus since the last war."

Rosmerta looked at her, and then at the leaflet, and her expression hardened. "So they'd be able to catch out any nasty piece of work who claimed he'd been under Imperius but wasn't?"

Hermione nodded. "I don't think any guilty parties are going to try the Imperius defense this time, if they have any sense." (Unspoken: _so don't you worry, Lucius Malfoy isn't walking that easily this time_.) She added, "But the important thing is that those who _have_ been under the curse need to heal, and that was why she took up the research in the first place. It's spell damage, after all."

Rosmerta looked at her, holding the little parchment in both her hands. "It's not any different from splinching yourself, is it? Only there's no shame in a splinching. And having done things you oughtn't—that are wrong—you feel ashamed all the time."

"It's spell damage," Hermione said. "But yes, with Imperius, the worst of it is the consequences, and the shame." That's why it's an Unforgivable, she thinks. If they'd seen this distraught woman, rather than the tap-dancing spider in fake-Moody's Defense class, it would have made the horror of it much clearer.

"I'll think about it," Rosmerta replied. "Fourth floor of St. Mungo's, it says."

"Yes," Hermione replies. "Spell damage."

***

**Saturday 19 September 1998**

For the first time since she came to the wizarding world at age eleven, Hermione is having a proper birthday celebration. Harry has taken the private room at the Three Broomsticks, the same one where the four of them drank their toasts to the post-war back in May. Four months ago. It feels like an age. Well, in Hermione's timeline, it's longer than that. She's been doubling back with the time-turner and she doesn't want to think about how much time she's really lived in that four months.

Her birthday fell on a Saturday this year, so she doesn't have to spend it at work. The celebration is a surprise. Mid-morning, just as she's finishing her flying drills with Malfoy, Neville comes to collect her. They're supposed to meet Harry at the Three Broomsticks, and they're already late, he says. He forgot to tell her. And not to worry about her clothes; she looks fine. She ends up carrying the racing broom with her. "Don't let me forget this in the pub," she says. Neville jokes that he'd put the reminder in the Remembrall, if he could just remember where he left it. She's a little taken aback to hear him joking about his memory—evidence, she supposes, that it's not such a sore point any more.

They hike to Hogsmeade. When they arrive, Hermione is distracted by her search for a place to put the expensive broom, and at first she's confused by the number of people in the room—she thought it was just Harry. Then it's clear: they're all shouting "Happy birthday!" Someone's taking pictures—ah, that would be Dean, with someone's borrowed camera. And they're already quite jovial, if not from the first round of drinks then from the opportunity for a celebration with no memorial overtones.

Dean and Luna both hand her parcels wrapped in brown paper, which turn out to be framed drawings. Dean has given her a print of his watercolor study of Draco and Blaise playing chess, reminding her that she admired it back in the summer, and an original portrait of herself, Ron, and Harry. Luna's gift is an impressionistic study of the garden at the Burrow shortly after sunrise, with gnomes creeping through the tall grass and the Weasleys' house backlit in the early morning light.

"Oh, these are wonderful!" she says.

Dean says, "Be very careful about praising artists. You'll be stuck with pictures for every birthday between now and a hundred and fifty." Hermione tells him that would be wonderful. She does get a little teary-eyed over Luna's picture, because she knows she won't be going back to the Burrow any time soon.

Harry and Ginny are there, their arms slung around each other. Hermione feels a certain pang looking at them, especially since Ron is there as well, and she's reminded of what she wanted for so long and no longer has. _Though it wasn't what I wanted once I had it_, she reminds herself. Harry, Ron, and Ginny skim over the awkwardness of the break-up by presenting her with a joint gift, which Harry tells her was actually suggested by Percy. It's a history of wizarding technology. "Since you're making strides in same," Harry says, "or so our secret sources tell us."

Neville gives her a book as well, a history of wizarding jurisprudence, with emphasis on the role of the Wizengamot in wartime and postwar situations. "Gran recommended this one," he says. "She thought you might enjoy it." He looks at the other book. "Oh yes, and she was thinking of this one but thought you might already own it."

After a drink or two, Hermione has no problem in concluding that this is her best birthday ever. Dean and Luna are telling amusing stories about sketching expeditions in Ottery St. Catchpole, Hogsmeade, and London. Harry and Ron and Ginny chime in with anecdotes from the Auror office. Neville isn't telling stories, but he's claimed the seat next to her, and she's aware of his warm presence. Okay, she isn't pining. She decided she wouldn't do that. But she's definitely enjoying it when he reaches for his drink and accidentally brushes her arm, and she's quite aware that she's doing the same thing when she reaches for hers, except on her part it isn't accidental. For one thing, she's not usually left-handed.

There are only a few awkward moments. One is when Ron sees the racing broom. "Isn't that a Nimbus 2001? They must be paying you well at that Ministry job!" She freezes. He ought to know perfectly well who's collecting the pay from her Ministry job, but she really doesn't want to bring that up here.

"It's not mine," she said. "It's on loan." Ron doesn't hear the note of _don't ask more_, and persists, "Who's loaning you that kind of broom?"

"Flying lessons," she said. "I wanted to be more comfortable with flying, if I'm going to stay here." Oh gods and goddesses, why'd she let that slip out? Neville comes to her rescue with a compliment, "They're helping, too. You were flying pretty well at Harry's party. But don't get the zeal of the convert and try to get _me_ onto a broom." He stands up, "Next round is mine. What's everyone having?"

That distracts them momentarily as some stand up to give drink orders and Ginny gets up to use the loo, but Harry's intrigued. He leans across the table. "You really _were_ flying well," he says.

"It helps not to have people shooting at you," she says.

"Ginny told me it was _Malfoy_ helping you. She's joking, right?"

"No," Hermione says. "He's not bad. Quite competent teacher. Favor to Neville, really." She wants the subjectchanged, and now, before Ron hears this.

Too late, because Ron cuts in, "Seriously, Hermione, you didn't accept a loan from him! I mean, remember Katie and the opal necklace, not to mention the poisoned mead. What part of 'Draco Malfoy' don't you understand?"

She says, "I talked to McGonagall and she had it checked for hexes." She looks pointedly at Harry. "Just like your Firebolt in third year. It checked out clean. And it hasn't given me any trouble. Nor has Malfoy. It's all fine with McGonagall, so if you don't mind, let's talk about something else."

Neville comes back with the drinks, and this helps to make a break in the subject matter. Ginny returns and settles down next to Harry, so Hermione turns to her and says, "So tell me about what's up with this civilian Patronus training. I just got an Owl from the Ministry about it. It puzzled me, because I thought it was only trainee Aurors doing that."

Ginny says, "They sent one to everyone on the Defense Association list. We're all being drafted, since the Dementor incident last week. We're just the first wave. They're trying to pull together a list of everyone in Britain who can cast a stable Patronus, but meanwhile they have to get the training underway."

"So how big a problem are the rogue Dementors?" she asks.

"They don't know yet," Harry says. "That's unofficial of course. Official is that we have the situation well in hand. But we all know that's not true."

The next awkward moment presents itself almost immediately. Ron says, "I heard from dad that you were doing more of your house-elf stuff at the Ministry. I thought you'd given up on _spew._"

Hermione tells him that all that she's done is to volunteer her name for the Committee on the Status of Sentient Magical Beings, when it finally convenes. Which it hasn't yet, in spite of numerous inquiries. Supposedly, the reason is that the work for the War Crimes Commission comes first. Which she'd be inclined to believe, except for her cynical conviction that the entrenched purebloods in the Ministry are just hoping she'll give up and that everyone else will forget about it.

"Which it would be stupid for them to do," she says. "Look at what trouble they've already bought themselves with the status of werewolves. Fenrir Greyback would have had absolutely no basis for organizing werewolf packs except that the werewolves don't have a place in wizarding society. And we're just lucky that Voldemort and friends didn't have the sense to cultivate good relations with the Goblins, or we could be sorting out an even bigger mess."

Ron takes the latter comment personally. "I'm tired of hearing about the grievances of the Goblins," he says. "Between you and Bill…" Harry lays a hand on his arm to quiet him, which is interesting.

"So how are things going with your parents coming back home?" Harry asks.

Hermione frowns. This is scarcely a more pleasant subject. "Well, since the Australian Ministry for Magic won't let anything happen until after the trials, I suppose the answer is not much. On the other hand, I don't have any bad news. Or, really, any news at all." She really doesn't want to talk about this. "And I don't know how safe it's going to be when they _do_ come back…"

Neville finds her hand under the table and gives it a quick sympathetic squeeze, then turns to Dean. "Hermione told me that the two of you crossed paths in London last week."

Dean picks up the cue immediately. "Yes, it was brilliant. I was showing Luna what rush hour in the City looks like, and there was Hermione in full Muggle costume—"

"—and in such a rush, too," Luna says. "I suppose that's why they call it rush hour. And such an infestation of Wrackspurts. No wonder the Muggles are confused."

"And she was just brushing off this chap who was dressed like a banker."

Hermione laughs. "He was dressed like a banker because that's what he _is._" She says, "That was the ever-persistent Nigel Black."

Dean chimes in, "Draco Malfoy's Muggle cousin."

That gets the attention of everybody at the table. Hermione says, "No, no, it's a joke. On account of his last name being Black. And he has the same sort of supercilious drawl. If I close my eyes I swear I'm back at Hogwarts. Except the words are different, of course."

"And he's never called you the M-word," Dean says. "So that ought to score him a date, oughtn't it?" Hermione rolls her eyes. "Even if you really are the exotic racial Other."

Luna says, "Of course, we waited until he was gone before we said hello. And she took us to tea at a lovely café."

"Out of sheer gratitude for our discretion," Dean says. "Though I think we both looked enough like proper Muggles. Or at least, we didn't look too different from art students. And we had our sketchbooks with us…"

Luna says, "I made some drawings while we were in the café. Muggles are fascinating. And there are so _many _of them."

Ron ignores Luna. He says, "You mean _Muggles_ are asking you for dates?"

Hermione sighs. "No,not _Muggles._ _One_ Muggle. He keeps his hands to himself, or I'd be tempted to compare him to Cormac McLaggen. He has the same kind of brainless persistence. Luckily I don't see him that often—just the big meetings at the bank."

Ron backs down, but he continues to look disgruntled. Hermione turns down the offer of a drink on the next round. "I'll need a clear head for later. I started revising for NEWTs."

That leads to a clamor of discussion about the sitting for the NEWTs, now scheduled for the end of February. McGonagall consulted with Derwent and then told her that the study she did for the Horcrux quest and the work she's now doing on the war crimes database have given her ample background in Arithmancy, Charms, Transfiguration and Defense against the Dark Arts, and that she should not worry about the lack of the formal seventh year. Harry and Luna have formed a study group at the Burrow. Ron is still undecided, with Percy and George each trying to persuade him of the pros and cons of finishing his formal education.

Harry proposes one last toast, "To Hermione, queen of the revision schedule!"

Which ends the celebration on a friendly note. The gathering breaks up, and Neville reaches overhead to get the racing broom for her. "You didn't even have to remind me," he says, and hands it to her.

Harry touches her arm, and says, "See you for lunch some time in Diagon Alley? We can Apparate over to the Leaky Cauldron. You know Hannah Abbott's working there now."

Hermione nods, but she's distracted by the brush of Neville's hand over hers as she takes possession of the broom. Her imagination, of course. Or maybe not, since Ron is glaring at her again.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – late September 1998)**

In the room where the War Crimes Commission meets, the tapestry with the unicorns and centaurs has entered my dreams. They're alive in the original, but they don't talk to me. In the dream, they talk: _ashes, ashes, we all fall down._ I'm sneezing from the dust.

The implausible roses turn into skulls and leer at me with the faces of the dead. Not just the ones who died, but the ones they planned to kill. The world is tapestried with dead, from the western isles to the shore of the German Sea. The three toads across from me—well, they really are toads. Toads in dress robes, and they croak, _See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil_. They take out their wands and cast a silencing hex on me, and then they set fire to the map of Australia.

The entire room is on fire, and I'm trying to carry on the meeting, speechless, while climbing a tower of furniture. Kingsley is behind me, in fact he even says, "Carry on, Granger. I'm behind you." It's imperative that we get to the end of the agenda before it all collapses and the flaming dragons and raptors and snakes devour us.

In the dream, I remember the reports of the Aurors who investigated the Room of Requirement in the week after the Battle of Hogwarts. They never found a trace of Vincent Crabbe, but he's indubitably dead--bones gone to black powder and swept away on a tempest of fire. I looked across the room at him for six years and I can't remember what he looks like.

I wake up in a cold sweat, realizing that I don't remember my parents' faces.

***


	20. Chapter 20

**SEPTEMBER 1998**

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

She can't really answer the question of why she's put off Harry's offer of lunch, but she does know that she's procrastinated about setting a date. She's working on the Pensieve data structure and she doesn't want to be distracted. Hours fly by as she stands among the racks of vials with the mist of memories glowing inside. It's hypnotic, like reading novels. She's learned all of the stories and now she really is launched on the serious programming. The structure is hooked up, for the most part, although she knows that the idiots on the War Crimes Commission will ask her for more fields to be added, and she knows (grinding her teeth with the knowledge) that likely this will continue all the way up to the eve of the official indictments.

She's pulled down the rack for the Battle of the Department of Mysteries to begin the work on the queries that will complete the picture of the battle. She can't help the somewhat mordant observation that this is mostly new to her since she was unconscious for the second half of the battle. And like altogether too many battles in history, it proved to be completely pointless. Harry was summoned there with a ruse, and the prophecy was destroyed in the course of the battle (thank you Neville), and Sirius died. Oh yes, and on the other side, it was the beginning of the end for the Malfoy family. Looking back, she can't see anything that was gained in that battle, except for the reluctant admission by the Ministry that Voldemort really had returned.

_What an unlikely band of warriors we were_, she thinks, and then startles as if she's summoned a ghost.

"Hello, Hermione." She looks up to see Harry standing in the doorway in his trainee Auror robes, black with scarlet facings. "You promised me a lunch date," he says.

"Well…" she temporizes. _I'm too busy_ doesn't sound right, but she can't come up with another excuse on short notice.

"Come on, Hermione, I haven't seen you since your birthday. And I'm meeting Andromeda and Teddy at the Leaky. You don't have anything right away, do you?"

She sighs, and puts the racks to one side with a note to Boudicca Derwent that she's gone to lunch and will be back to work on the Battle of the Department of Mysteries, so please don't re-shelve. "I'll be along in a minute," she says. No use putting it off, and why is she so uncomfortable, anyway? Harry's her oldest friend here.

As she and Harry walk down the corridor to the elevator, she does her best to ignore the stares. They're used to her working on this corridor, but Harry is a novelty.

***

It turns out that Harry has a tab at the Leaky, and he's firm with her that she's to order what she likes. Well, he would know her situation, wouldn't he, since he was in that original meeting with Bill Weasley.

They sit in a booth in the corner, and Harry asks her why she hasn't been in touch since her birthday. She shrugs and tells him things have been rather busy and seem to be getting busier all the time. They're in the run-up to the construction of the actual indictments; she's going to be busy for the next three months, since they're hoping to issue the official list of defendants early in the new year.

Harry asks her if she has any hints yet who's on the list.

"No more than common sense would dictate," she says. "At this point, your guess is as good as mine." Out of habit, she drops her voice. "It's the Ministry, so common sense isn't necessarily a reliable guide." May as well be straight with him on this one. "And in any case, once they close in on it, I won't be able to talk about it."

"Not even with your friends?"

"Not with anyone," she says. "They'll be putting us all under Fidelius."

Harry considers that for a minute. She's spared further conversation on that point as a woman with a baby on her hip slides into the booth with an apologetic murmur, and looks up to face her—

--with the features of Bellatrix Lestrange.

Hermione's heart races and she has her wand out before Harry even notices, though he does catch her wrist in mid-air as she's backing out of the booth into combat stance.

"No," he says. "It's Andromeda. Not Bellatrix."

Hermione takes a deep breath and looks at the woman who startled her. It's only in the dim light of the booth that the resemblance is so pronounced; it's all bone structure and skin tone, and the contrast of Andromeda's brown hair with her pale face. In full sunlight at Harry's birthday party, she didn't notice it quite so much. She pockets her wand and sits down, feeling foolish, and mumbles an apology.

Andromeda smiles ruefully. "Harry made the same mistake last year," she says. "Almost got into a row with Ted over it." Her mouth quirks in an expression of distaste. "It's happened a few times since, so I'm giving thought to dyeing my hair." She smiles at Harry. "Since I'm an honorary Weasley, ginger might be a fitting choice." Harry grins back, so Hermione concludes this is a joke of sorts between them, not that there's much funny about being mistaken for Bellatrix Lestrange.

Teddy fusses and waves his arms. "Ah, it's about lunch time for you too," she says, and adjusts him in her arms for nursing. Hermione tries not to stare as Andromeda tucks Teddy against her breast and deftly moves the layers of her robes out of the way. She must be wearing something adapted to nursing a baby, and Hermione finds her curiosity rising again, since she knows almost nothing about baby care in the wizarding world. (And how is Andromeda able to nurse a baby when she's in her mid-forties and it's not her child?) At least the choice of a booth rather than a table makes sense now; it's not just about Harry's celebrity status.

With her other hand, Andromeda reaches into the purse at her hip and brings out a plump parchment envelope. She says to Harry, "I made copies of all the pictures I had. Really didn't want to sort through them…" Her voice trails off with a facial expression close to pain. "You can pick the ones you like." She smiles at Hermione. "That goes for you too," she says. "I know you were fond of Nymphadora and Remus."

They order lunch, and then she and Harry look at the pictures while Andromeda nurses Teddy.

There's a huge sheaf of them in the envelope, in no particular order. Hermione suspects that the envelope is charmed to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, because there seem to be several albums' worth. Harry takes them out carefully and starts leafing through. There's fourteen-year-old Andromeda on her broom, with seven-year-old Sirius perched in front of her; the three Black sisters in traditional robes, demurely stair-steps in the back garden of Twelve Grimmauld Place with Sirius and Regulus sitting in the front row, similarly dressed. Narcissa, all of maybe seven or eight, stands out as the sole blonde head among the dark-haired, fair-skinned Black cousins. Then there's a wild-haired, grinning nine- or ten-year-old girl on a racing broom, who can be none other than Tonks herself. Her hair, cowlicks in all directions, flares wildly between gas blue and fuchsia.

"Can I look at that one?" Hermione says. She takes the picture and looks at the girl.

Andromeda leans over to look and smiles. "Oh, I remember that. Picnic with some friends from Hogwarts. Let's see, she was nine, so it must have been late summer of 1982. Two years before she got her Hogwarts letter, not that it was in doubt by that point. She was showing off." She reaches over to the stack of photographs next to Harry and pulls out a handful.

There's Tonks flying upside down through the apple orchard, waving as she plucks the fruit from low-hanging branches; Tonks in a pick-up Quidditch game with her father and several other witches and wizards she isn't sure she recognizes; a close-up of Tonks holding up a fluttering Golden Snitch, her face radiant in a gap-toothed grin and her hair rippling blue-green like a mermaid's locks. A back view of Tonks walking away with her racing broom over one shoulder and a wriggling toddler tucked under the other arm. Hermione laughs at the way that Tonks handles the child as if it were a pet or a large toy. There's another one with the same child, sitting in front of Tonks on her racing broom as she demonstrates the correct grip by wrapping its chubby hands around the broomstick. Hermione smiles because of the way that the composition echoes the picture of Sirius sitting in front of Andromeda on her broom.

Then, unexpectedly, there's a formal portrait of Tonks in her scarlet Auror robes against a black ground, standing very straight with an uncharacteristically solemn expression and her wand held out in front of her in the duellist's salute to the opponent. With a pang, Hermione is reminded of the World War I soldier's portrait she saw on Mrs. Longbottom's mantelpiece. The faces have the same serious yet optimistic expression: young warriors elated to have finished their training and turning to face the _real thing._ The real thing, she thinks bitterly, that killed them. How many faces like that are looking out of photographs all over wizarding Britain right now, not knowing that their originals are dead?

She nudges Harry and whispers, "Can I have this one?" He takes a sidelong glance and nods. She looks at the stack he's working through; from the ones he's picked, she suspects he's more in search of pictures of Sirius and Remus.

And then there's one of nine-year-old Tonks flying through the orchard, this time right side up, with the little toddler astride the broomstick in front of her and clearly shrieking in delight. She has one hand on the shaft of the broomstick and the other around the child's waist to steady, although the chubby little legs are wrapped around the broomstick in more or less correct form and its hands are gripping the polished shaft in the right position. She feels a pang of envy, thinking about the older kids she didn't have to show her how to ride a broomstick when she was a little girl. She imagines the tiny passenger is a little girl, though it's hard to tell, in the sort of medieval nightshirt thing it's wearing. For that matter, it could be a little sheepdog, since its blond fringe is long enough to obscure its eyes.

Then there's Tonks returning the child to its mother, clearly to its intense displeasure. It's throwing a fit, flailing arms and legs in all directions and screwing up its face in what has to be an earsplitting yowl. The mother, her face shaded by a loosely tied kerchief, is smiling indulgently as she reaches out to receive him. Him, yes, in the next picture it's unambiguous because he's splayed across his mama's lap, shirt riding up over his belly, still crying and thrashing, while she's fanning him and trying to feed him something. Tonks looks on with an expression of mild curiosity.

Hermione laughs looking at the tableau. "Oh, I bet that one grew up to be trouble," she says. "And look at Tonks—she doesn't know what the fuss is about."

Andromeda leans over to look, and frowns. "As it happens, he _did_ grow up to be trouble." She looks at the picture a little longer and says, "I'd forgotten Cissy came to that picnic. In disguise, of course. I still don't know how she found out about it; it's not as if I'd been sending her invitations."

Hermione says, "I thought your sisters never spoke to you again after you married Ted."

"Well, Bella certainly, but Cissy wasn't a fanatic. I think she wanted me to see her little one before he started to talk. After, of course, there was no question." Hermione stares at the picture. She's never seen Narcissa Malfoy wearing Muggle clothes before, least of all an outfit as dowdy and matronly as this. Though now that she knows who it is, the indulgent expression is all too familiar. She'd wager that whatever Narcissa is feeding baby Draco, it's not something that her own parents would approve. With all the sweets he's eaten over the years, it's a wonder the boy has any teeth at all.

She holds out the picnic pictures to Harry and he indicates she can take them. She's intrigued by the story they tell. Summer of 1982, so that just after the last war, and there's Narcissa crossing enemy lines, as it were, to show off her baby to her older sister. Bellatrix was already in Azkaban by then, and Lucius was publicly claiming to have been under Imperius the whole time. Perhaps Narcissa wasn't being so daring at all to go visiting with her renegade sister. She supposes that Bellatrix wouldn't have been much interested in babies, except as future soldiers.

There's another with the two sisters and their offspring, sitting in dappled sunlight and shade: Narcissa's face is almost entirely in shadow under the kerchief she's pulled forward into a cowl, with her child sitting upright in her lap and squinting against the light, wearing his shirt again; Andromeda sits with Tonks in her lap as well. Tonks' arms wrap around her mother's neck and her skinny frame leans into her shoulder. What Hermione feels like a shadow across that picture is the absent third sister. Ted must have taken the picture, because otherwise he'd be in the frame, unlike Narcissa's husband, who likely didn't even know that she was there. (Or if he did, he pretended not to know, she corrects herself, remembering what she's read of aristocratic discretion.)

Harry leans over to look at the pictures and starts to laugh. "Oh, that's Malfoy, all right," he says. "He's throwing a tantrum, and she's trying to buy him off with sweets."

At that point, the food arrives and they put the pictures aside. Teddy has finished nursing and is drowsing against his grandmother's shoulder.

***

Over lunch, Andromeda and Harry talk about the plans for moving some part of the household to Twelve Grimmauld Place. The Burrow is crowded, and it's difficult sleeping two and three to a room. There's hardly any work space; Luna is studying for NEWTs and Dean is working on his portfolio for art school; Percy brings home his work from the Ministry and receives frequent Owls from other members of the Dispensing Committee. George brings home the accounts from the joke shop. Recently, Harry and Ron have started thinking about preparing for the NEWTs themselves, and when they start revising they'll need study space as well. On the other hand, a large household is a well-defended household. Andromeda and Molly spend some amount of their time reinforcing the defenses, and at full moon the adults take shifts keeping watch for werewolf attacks.

Hermione is reminded of the book that Molly gave her, at which she's scarcely glanced. She rummages around in her beaded bag and brings it out. She looks at the listing of topics in the table of contents: Cookery, Clothing, Cleaning, Gardening, Interior Design, Household Defense, Health. Apparently, even before the war and the state of emergency, basic magical fortifications were reckoned as a branch of the domestic arts.

Andromeda quirks a curious eyebrow. "Oh, it was a gift from Mrs. Weasley," Hermione says.

"Very useful book," Andromeda says. "Ted and I got a copy as a wedding gift." Hermione remembers Tonks' remarks about her mother's mastery of packing charms and the like, and thinks she'll take another look. After all, knowledge is useful in and of itself, and you never know when something you learned in some other connection will save your life.

Teddy sleeps through most of the meal, and it's only as they're finishing that he wakes and stretches in his grandmother's arms. Hermione volunteers to hold him. He's soft and warm, and he stares at her hair in fascination; before she thinks to intervene, he's grabbed a handful of it. Andromeda laughs ruefully as Hermione untangles the tiny fingers. "He does remind me of Nymphadora at that age," she says. "He goes after everything that interests him." She dabs at her eyes. "She was quite a handful. We'd thought about having two or three, but once we had her, it was clear that one was all we could manage. I don't know how Molly Weasley does it."

Harry asks her if she's gotten an answer back from her Owl. Andromeda nods, and picks up one of the photographs Hermione was looking at. It's the one with Tonks handing baby Draco back to his mother. She looks at the picture for a long time before she says, "It's odd to hear from her after so long. She sent me a condolence note, you know. She doesn't say much about herself, just talks about the weather and the rose garden and how the peacocks are still making a nuisance of themselves." She shakes her head. "I have no idea what's going to become of them, but family is still family. If there's nothing else we learned from this war, that ought to be it." She looks at Hermione. "She asked me if I knew anyone at Hogwarts who'd be able to tell me about how Draco is faring. She doesn't like the sound of some of his recent letters."

Hermione takes a deep breath. "You could write to Headmistress McGonagall; I'm sure she'd be able to tell you." She's remembering what McGonagall said about _appropriate discretion_, and isn't sure she should say anything at all. Still, it's disconcerting to be reminded again that this is Narcissa Malfoy's sister sitting across from her. She'd much rather think of her as Tonks' mother, or Remus Lupin's mother-in-law, or Teddy's grandmother, or Sirius Black's favorite cousin. 

Andromeda puts the picture down. "I think Cissy was hinting around that I should try to see him in person," she says.

Harry looks awkward. Hermione isn't sure what to say. She's trying to imagine an interview between Draco and the aunt he doesn't know.

"You two know him," she says.

"Not well," Hermione says.

"We weren't friends," Harry says. Hermione thinks that's as diplomatic a sentence as she's ever heard from Harry's mouth. _Daggers drawn_ is more like it.

Hermione says, "To be honest, he was the first person here who called me the M-word." Teddy reaches for her hair again, giving her a timely interruption. She lets his chubby hand close over her index finger, while she thinks about what to say next.

Andromeda makes a sour face. "That's pretty much what I would have expected from their child, I suppose." Teddy starts to fuss and wriggle. Harry takes him from Hermione's arms and talks to him, as Andromeda continues, "I suppose I'll write to the Headmistress."

Hermione says, "I think that would be the best thing to do. Then it's all official." Should she spell out to Andromeda that her nephew is under protective custody, or does she already know that?

Andromeda nods. "Yes, under current circumstances, I suppose official is best." She sighs. "It's cowardly of me, of course, but if the Headmistress refuses me I can't say I'll be disappointed. There's nothing I've heard of the boy that makes him sound particularly pleasant."

***

After Andromeda leaves, Harry says, "You haven't been down to the Auror office since the end of July. That's a month and a half."

Hermione doesn't really want to get into this right now. "I've been busy. I told you." Harry looks back at her with that mulish expression she knows all too well. She says, "I can't believe you're making an issue of this."

"Ron and Ginny are wondering what you're thinking."

"Well, if they wanted to know what I'm thinking, why didn't they come along on the lunch date?"

"They think you're avoiding them. And I don't like being the go-between."

"Harry, nobody's asked you to do that. At least, I haven't. And has it occurred to you I might have some reasons to feel less than friendly since what happened at your birthday party?"

Harry says, "I don't understand."

"Somebody broke my nose, and I can guess who. Who else had a Beater's bat and a bludger? Unless that was friendly fire." Talking about it, she realizes she's still angry. "And Ron made an unholy fuss about Neville fixing my nose. And I really _have_ been busy, and I don't have time for this kind of game. If they want to talk to me, they can talk to me themselves. I'm not asking you to take sides or play go-between."

"A broken nose in a Quidditch match—that's really nothing to get upset about."

"So it was _nothing to get upset about_ when Malfoy broke your nose on the train? One quick _Episkey_ and you were good as new."

"That's not the same thing."

"You're right, it wasn't the same thing. He wasn't your friend. Whereas Ron and Ginny were supposed to be my friends, and they behaved abominably." She can feel her face getting hot. "Look, I told you I wasn't asking you to play go-between. So I don't know why we're talking about this."

Harry stares at the table and turns his empty glass in his hand.

"Do they know you're having lunch with me?"

"No." He turns the glass and watches the last glimmer of butterbeer in the bottom, then turns it in the other direction. "It didn't seem a good thing to mention it."

"So since you're playing go-between anyway, would you mind telling me _your theory_ about why they did that? Because if we're going to keep cycling back to it, I would like to know. Just out of scientific curiosity, mind you."

"Neville mentioned you'd been practicing your flying." He pauses and stares into the glass, as if looking for the answer at the bottom. "And Ginny heard who'd been coaching you. And she just took offense at you pretending to be some kind of athlete." Frowning, he added, "And she'd had a couple of firewhiskeys before she started playing."

"Harry, this is stupid. We're talking about a favor I was doing for Neville. Malfoy is bored to death and he's always nagging Neville to go flying with him. And you know Neville likes flying even less than I do."

He puts the glass down on the table and lines it up with the ring of condensation on the wooden surface. He's shaking his head slowly, not meeting her eyes. "I don't understand what happened. Things were supposed to be better after we won the war. Isn't that why we fought it?"

She isn't sure what to say. There's too much unexploded ordnance littering the countryside to call this the end of the war. There are the werewolves, and the rogue Dementors, and the vigilantes who've decided that they're still fighting the war. Nobody's solved the extrajudicial murders of the seventh-year Slytherins, and she's heard that erstwhile Snatchers—and those suspected of such—have been killed in similar fashion. It's only a matter of time before someone decides to revive the Death Eaters, if only as a matter of self-defense.

"Harry, you're the Auror-in-training. I think you know just how far the war is over. We're still in a state of emergency." She hesitates before saying the next thing. "And none of us came through it without some wounds. On the inside or the outside. It doesn't sound to me as if Ginny is doing very well." She says, "And you haven't said how you're doing, either."

"I'm all right," he says, running a hand through his hair. "The scar is just a scar now." His mouth pulls tight in what would be a smile except that it looks too much like a reaction to pain. "Ginny has nightmares. I didn't know. From second year." He says, "I don't know if I should tell you this." She waits. "Luna tells me that Ginny wakes her up three or four times in a night. She thinks she's still in the Chamber of Secrets with Tom Riddle."

It's pointless to ask, but she does so anyway. "Have you considered getting help? I mean both of you."

He says, "No help to be had. There's Dreamless Sleep, but she can't take it all the time."

"And she's in Auror training with you and Ron."

"The Harpies cancelled the team tryouts. So have all the other teams. Everything's on hold pending the trials. Nobody's playing international matches and we're banned from the World Cup. There's no point in bringing on new players unless they have a chance to compete, and that wasn't going to happen this year. And she needed something to do, so she's training with us. It isn't clear that Quidditch players are needed at the moment, but we do need Aurors."

Hermione rubs her eyes. This is worse than she thought.

Harry says, "I think it was a mistake for Neville to mention Malfoy. She got a look in her eye. Look, tell him that. Not to mention _anybody_ named Malfoy around her. She's on about them all the time."

"Worse than Ron?"

"Much worse. It's Lucius who gave her the diary and put her in hell."

Hermione fishes in the pocket of her robes, pulls out Boudicca Derwent's card, and pushes it across the table to Harry. "Look, see if you can get Ginny in there. I'm seeing her, and she's good. She knows a lot about spell damage, and if she doesn't handle possession cases, she'll refer you. And I'm sorry to sound callous, but Ginny's case is interesting. So's yours, for that matter. I don't think you'll have any problem getting in."

She adds, "And if it will help to convince Ginny, tell her that documenting the damage will probably strengthen the case against Lucius."

***


	21. Chapter 21

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – probably first week of October 1998)**

When I close my eyes, I see the flow of currency in the ether. The numbers glide through the electric darkness across international borders, zeroes and ones at the cellular level, as I well know. On glowing screens continents away, great blocks of them move from hand to hand. This is magic. Actually, it's an exchange of promises, which is nearly the same thing: the alchemical minuet of money.

Like radioactivity, you can't see it, but it can kill you. It is the sinews of war, and the chief engine of human misery. And I am one of the myrmidons shoring up the walls, a sentry on the Great Wall of China, to keep that flow well within its channels, so that no unauthorized pipelines open up to divert it to other hands.

Nigel Black is rather fond of talking about money. He waxes poetic about market forces and the invisible hand. He smirks sidelong while doing so, and that's for my benefit even if technically I'm beneath his notice.

My fingers twitch thinking about the slim wooden rod that doesn't register on the security checks at the entrance. I made a sleeve holster for it, since I'm no longer comfortable if it's not within easy reach. In the loops of the holster, its well-worn handle nestles against the inside of my left wrist. In a heartbeat, I can slide my right hand into my left sleeve and be better armed than anyone in this building. Fortunately for Nigel, I am law-abiding both in this world and in my own.

Nigel talks about horse racing and the stock market and watching tennis at Wimbledon. He wants me to know that he commands more of that invisible stuff than most anyone in this room. He can reach out into the atmosphere and transmute skeins of that energy into solid goods at will. He's too genteel, of course, to say, _I could buy you and sell you a thousand times over._ Because the Right Sort don't do that.

At times like this, I resist the rude urge to stretch my fingers out in front of me and watch his pale eyes boggle as bolts of energy leap from fingertip to fingertip. I am too discreet to do that, and much too well-brought-up to say, _I could kill you or take over your will or turn you inside out screaming in agony._ Because the Right Sort don't do that.

If I close my eyes in these meetings, I hear his voice, which is so _not of my world_ that it sounds unreal. I don't know his people, or his sort of people, because we simply never crossed paths; I've only ever seen them on television. (Or across the Great Hall at boarding school, but that's another story.) Regrettably, I have lost my cloak of invisibility—the metaphorical one—and I am being watched. Nigel's people have dealt in _power_ for generations and he recognizes it even if it's not of a kind he knows. And he's intrigued by someone who isn't interested in what he has to offer.

Traditionally, that's the stuff of poetry (see _unrequited passion_), but frankly Nigel is rather a pest. He's intrigued by the exotic, so rather than leave it alone and find someone from his own world, he's pursuing the obvious alien who isn't interested in him. Unfortunately, he has nothing to offer me, and like his doppelganger in my world, he's too spoiled to comprehend that the world is not constructed for the purpose of giving him what he wants. No, let me be fair. Draco Malfoy has gotten a fair introduction to what he isn't going to get. In fact, the fates have seen fit to grind his face in it. Nigel Black, on the other hand, is still happily ensconced in a cocoon of hereditary privilege.

It's most distracting, because I never meant this job to be anything more than a sideline. I love the anonymity on this side of the border, but I'm coming to realize that it's temporary at best. I can visit here, but I can't live here. Even my pied-a-terre in the suburbs, the house in which I was reared by my professional-class parents, is an outpost of the other world. The notice-me-not is borrowed from Spinner's End, the nested perimeter defenses from Malfoy Manor. The upstairs rooms have heavy shielding to permit me to use electronics. Otherwise, inside that ring of magical energy, it would be as impossible to use the computer or the telephone as it is at Hogwarts or Diagon Alley.

Dean and I regularly go to lunch and eat Indian food and talk about crossing back over, but we both know that we can't live there. Dean's been tempted, because he's actually had some success selling his work, even without art school behind him. But we can't live as if we were one of them, because we aren't. Even if we pretend, our children will out us. Regardless of what Dolores Umbridge would like you to believe, magic breeds true—if anything, it seems to strengthen with out-crossing—and in the offspring of matches between Muggles and magicals, it behaves very much like a dominant trait.

Which, as it happens, was the subject of our conversation this week. Dean and I had lunch because I had news to give him. We found his father.

Not alive, unfortunately. But he turned up in a memory in the first wave of memory collection from the captured Death Eaters. Rodolphus Lestrange, as it happens, who's unavailable for further comment because he was one of the first to go mad when the Dementors returned to Azkaban fortress.

Mr. Thomas was apparently a wizard of some attainment, but he turned down an offer to join the Death Eaters. That's the reason he abruptly left his wife and son: for their own safety. Lestrange was the messenger who brought the offer, and also the assassin who followed up on the refusal. Interesting. Mr. Thomas must have been quite something for Voldemort to have sent the husband of Bellatrix to recruit him. And for once, I actually asked permission before I lifted something from the archives. I talked with Boudicca Derwent about it, because Dean is going to be called as a witness for the trials and he will find out anyway when he hears that his blood status has been changed from muggle-born to half-blood. Not that I hope any of that matters in the brave new postwar world, but it goes to prove that the Death Eaters may have been wizards but they were not database wizards.

I told Dean that he could tell his mother the truth, because it would probably help her to know what really happened, even if it's been more than eighteen years. Nothing's worse than having someone disappear without a trace and without a reason. And disappearance was a Death Eater specialty. We're still tracking those down. But that's another story.

***

Neville is sitting on the couch in his front room at Hogwarts, petting Crookshanks, while Hermione labors over the NEWTs revision schedules. She looks up from time to time to watch him. Her cat has made himself thoroughly at home in Neville's rooms, much to her satisfaction. She'd been afraid that it would be an unhappy exile, and here the rascal has settled in quite comfortably. Neville looks sleepy and content, running his fingers through the thick orange fur, and Hermione ruthlessly suppresses the thought that it would be nice to have those fingers running through her hair.

Their eyes meet, and inexplicably Neville blushes.

"He likes you," she says.

"Better than Trevor did," Neville says, scratching Crookshanks behind the ears. She can hear the purring from where she sits on the floor, working at the low table. She reaches up and strokes the furry flank, her fingers momentarily sliding from the fur to the corduroy covering Neville's thigh. "I suppose it helps to be warm-blooded," he adds.

"Crookshanks seems to think so," she says. "He seems to find you quite satisfactorily warm." Indeed, the big cat has nestled into Neville's lap with no apparent plans to budge, although his previous travels are marked by loose orange hairs which show well against the dark-brown ridges of the corduroy trousers. Rather an autumnal theme, she thinks, orange and brown. Neville half-closes his eyes and leans forward to wrap one arm around the furry bulk. Crookshanks yawns, stretches a little, then settles back between Neville's belly and his encircling forearm.

In imitation, she stretches herself a little, realizing that she's feeling stiff from the hours at work over the schedules. Ten subjects, everything but Care of Magical Creatures and Divination. Crookshanks opens one eye and looks at her.

"Yes, I ought to follow your good example and stretch more often," she says to Crookshanks, leaning back to face him. Abruptly she realizes that this looks quite equivocal: she's leaned her head back against the inside of Neville's knee, and his fingertips are now trailing in her hair, not inches from her face.

"It must be a good life to be a cat," he says. "Particularly this cat." He's looking at her, smiling a sleepy half-smile as he cuddles Crookshanks.

"That great orange beast," Ron used to call him. Neville seems to have a somewhat more favorable opinion of Crookshanks, and vice versa.

And she has the all but irresistible urge to take those fingertips and kiss them.

Which she might have done, had a drawling tenor voice not cut in, "Longbottom, you are spoiling that beast." Draco walked in, his dressing gown loose around him, nodded to her in acknowledgment, seated himself next to Neville, then rubbed Crookshanks on the top of the head. "You are a great spoiled monster, aren't you?" he said, leaning against Neville's arm.

He was taking rather too familiar a tone with her cat. It would be absurd to say that aloud, of course. Crookshanks didn't seem particularly put out by Draco's attentions, squeezing his eyes shut and leaning into the caressing hand. Hermione flinches, thinking about the nasty things he's done for years and worrying that her cat trusts him rather too much, from the look of it.

What else she can't say aloud that he is taking the wrong tone with Neville, as well, and sitting far too close.

She fans out the schedules on the table and waves her wand over them to produce the duplicates. Draco leans forward to look over her shoulder. His long hair actually brushes against her face. She stiffens. He traces the column of subjects with his index finger on the topmost parchment.

"Granger, this is amazing. Is this how you organized …" (there's a pause that may correspond to one of Neville's looks) "… Potter and Weasley?"

"Yes," she says. "Do you object to being organized?" She doesn't begrudge him the schedule, since she's doing them for everyone, but there's going to be a _discussion_ later with Neville; she didn't have the sense to veto his tacit assumption that Draco would be included in the study group.

"No, I hear and obey," he says, but the light mocking tone implies trouble to come. Nothing for it but to nip it in the bud. She turns to challenge him, and his face is inches from hers. She's only ever seen it that close in her parents' bathroom mirror, when she was examining her own Polyjuiced features. The grey eyes do have little flecks of blue and green in them, and the brows and lashes are in fact startlingly blond.

She's momentarily fascinated to find herself reacting as she did to the reflection in the mirror: tracing details with her eyes, and not breaking eye contact. This plainly disconcerts him, but he doesn't back away. There are three little freckles on his nose, which she didn't notice before, and the planes of his cheekbones aren't quite as pronounced as she remembers. Is it the lighting or has he gained some weight since May?

He licks his lips nervously, and abruptly his face flushes pink. He sits back and looks at her with an expression she's never seen before. She turns and looks at him curiously. That's the effect of having walked around in his skin, she thinks; he strikes her as _not quite real_. If he were real, he would have broken eye contact by now. She oughtn't to be staring, either, but can't resist; her eyes rove in curiosity, comparing him to the borrowed body whose vital signs she catalogued months ago. From the way that his dressing gown drapes from his shoulders and knees, over the short nightshirt, he appears to have put on some weight since she tried on his skin and weighed herself on the bathroom scale in the other world. Maybe five kilograms or so.

He shifts on the couch, and abruptly she's aware that she's looking at his bare knees and the shadow of the nightshirt on his pale thighs—and from this position it might very well look as if she's ogling things she oughtn't. She turns back to look at the calendar, mostly to hide the flare of heat in her own face. She remembers the moment in the first flying lesson and a similar moment of awareness. _Under our clothes we're all naked._

She is not going to think about that. She's going to think about revision schedules. She takes out her calendar, consults the timelines for each of the subjects, and starts blocking out her free time… well, the free time she's going to steal using the time turner.

She's not going to think about him leaning against Neville like that, under cover of petting her cat, who's traitorously purring at having two humans petting him. She is going to think about where she can squeeze in the time to revise Arithmancy properly. There's something simultaneously feline and childish about the way Draco has just insinuated himself into Neville's personal space, and she's quite sure that she doesn't approve. Not that she has a say in the matter.

Behind her, she feels Neville shift. She glances over her shoulder; he's moved away from Draco just enough to open up a space between them without dislodging Crookshanks from his lap.

She's not going to pretend to compete; how can she? In any case, she has work to do. She stands, takes one set of copies and hands it to Draco, saying, "Here's your set of the NEWTs revision schedules. If there are any changes, I'll mark them on my copy and they'll show up on all the other copies. Everything but Care of Magical Creatures and Divination. If you're doing either of those, you're on your own."

Neville adds, "Luna's revising Care of Magical Creatures, and Lavender and Parvati are doing Divination."

She doesn't really want to look at Neville, either, given that he's implicitly including Draco. It's one thing to do the flying lessons; he behaves himself there, at least, because he knows that she doesn't have to do it. NEWTs revision, on the other hand, is something she cares about.

She hands Neville his set of revision schedules, trying not to look at him, and leaves the room. As the door closes behind her, she hears Neville say, "You were doing that on purpose." The rest of the conversation is muffled by the heavy wooden door. Not that she cares, but at least Neville _noticed_ that.

***

She's fairly sure that she can do ten NEWTs: everything except for Divination and Care of Magical Creatures. Defense, Charms, Transfiguration, Potions and Herbology—she'll be doing those along with Harry, Ron, Luna and Neville. Then she'll be doing Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, History of Magic, and Muggle Studies. Maybe Astronomy. It's only the first week of October, so there are five months in which to make up any deficiencies.

It's another set of time loops to manage, but as yet there are plenty of unoccupied rooms in her parents' house.

Even as she's revising for NEWTs from the officially approved texts, she's developed some fairly severe doubts about the History of Magic curriculum. She has a whole list of questions she'd never seen addressed: how did the house elves come to be bound to individual families? Where did the Dementors come from, and how are they controlled by the Ministry? (Or maybe she should ask, how did the Ministry once control them, because she has the evidence of her own eyes to tell her that there are Dementors out there now that answer to nobody.)

Where did the great wizarding fortunes come from? Where did the Potters, Blacks, and Malfoys make their money? She does recognize that questions about money are as impolite in the wizarding world as in the Muggle one. Percy mentioned the Chattox and Device fortune as an exception—it sounds like an _industrial _fortune, very specifically—and he mentioned Lancashire as their base of operations, which makes sense for technology transfer since it's the Muggle industrial north. Exactly how did engineering ideas travel from the Muggle world to the wizarding world? She'd like to find Emily, that girl in the portrait, and ask her about how that worked. It sounded as if there were a considerable lag. A hundred years, she said, for art and culture.

Emily had mentioned she had a portrait at Hogwarts in a common room. A House Quidditch team portrait, specifically. Hermione has checked the Hogwarts yearbooks for the 1900s and 1910s and hasn't turned up an Emily Longbottom. Well, all that proves is that whoever she is, she isn't in the paternal line. Unfortunately, Emily appears to have been a very popular name for that generation of Hogwarts witches. She found two Emilys in Ravenclaw (one of them is a Lovegood), three in Hufflepuff (Abbot, Nott, and Flitwick), two in Slytherin (a Rosier and a Chattox), and one in Gryffindor (with a surname she doesn't recognize). Of these eight girls named Emily, four are Quidditch players, which doesn't narrow things at all. Emily in the portrait mentioned playing against someone named Malfoy. Yes, there's an Apollonius Paracelsus Malfoy listed as Reserve Seeker for Slytherin. Class of 1911. She had to stifle a giggle at the given names.

Neville comes in as she's reviewing her notes as she sits at the low table in his front room, that now serves them as a common room. "What are you laughing about?"

She says, "I was doing some research and I think I found Malfoy's great-grandfather in the Hogwarts yearbook. Apollonius Paracelsus, if you can believe it. Could his parents have been any more insistent that_ yes, he's a real wizard?_ Of course, I shouldn't laugh. I was named after a character from Shakespeare."

"So what were you working on?"

"A tangent from History of Magic. Something Percy Weasley told me about. I shouldn't get sidetracked, though, because it won't be on the NEWTs. I've been working on the revision roster. Which NEWTs are you taking?"

"Well, the four the Aurors want, plus Herbology and Muggle Studies. Maybe some of the theory courses too, but I haven't decided."

She checks off in the column headed 'Neville': _Charms, Transfiguration, Defense, Potions, Herbology, Muggle Studies. _ She puts an asterisk in the cell for Herbology, since Neville is the best in their year. Adds a star next to his name for Defense, too; he's good at thinking on his feet. "Harry's doing all of those. He told me that Ron's doing everything but Muggle Studies. Luna's the only one doing Care of Magical Creatures. I think she's going to be coming to Hogwarts to meet with Hagrid, so maybe the three of us can do a study group together for the other subjects."

Neville looks over her shoulder. "You don't have a column for Draco."

She makes a face. "I had no idea that you'd want to study with him." _Or that any of us want him around,_ but that's too rude to say aloud.

"He's doing Potions and Herbology, at a minimum. And all of the theory courses except for Muggle Studies." He leans over her shoulder to run his fingertip down the column for courses: "Divination, Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, History of Magic, and Astronomy."

"What about Charms, Transfiguration, Defense?"

Neville gives her a speaking look.

"Sorry. I forgot. Well, we could pencil him in if he recovers. I'm not sure I'd want to revise with him for Defense—well, _practically, _I might. I bet he knows some dirty things that aren't on the syllabus, but I'm sure the examiners take points off for Unforgivables." She looks at him. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"It will be good for him." Neville frowns when he sees her expression. "Hermione, you're the one who's always arguing for fairness."

She's suddenly angry. "This is the person who called me 'mudblood.' And stood by while I was tortured. And who's just been an unforgivable _wanker_ every year we've been in school." She realizes she sounds like Ron. What she can't add, at least not aloud, because it sounds even more childish: _and the person who's taking all your time lately._ She isn't jealous of stupid Malfoy, because that would mean she's making a claim on Neville's time, and she'd only be doing that if she were interested. Which she isn't, except maybe in theory—by firelight, perhaps, or if he were interested too, or if his Gran would approve. _But I wasn't on the list._ And it's not as if she has lots of time of her own lately. As it is, she's just barely keeping the sleep-to-work ratio large enough to keep McGonagall at bay.

She bites her lip, because the tears are welling up. She absolutely _hates_ these mood swings. She supposes she ought to be grateful that she's not screaming and yelling and cutting loose with Unforgivable Curses in public, like a crazed war veteran out of a Hollywood film.

Neville sits down next to her. "Hermione," he says. "I know he _was_ all of that. And you've always wanted to be fair to everyone. And he has been on good behavior lately." Surely it's her imagination; is he so close that she can feel the blaze of heat from his body? Her heart is pounding and her face is hot; no, this not physical heat from anywhere in the room, but lust that feels like white-hot steel.

She takes a deep breath. "All right. He's in. As long as he continues to behave." She closes off the grid with a vicious slash of her quill. "I don't suppose I care if he hates me, as long as he keeps it to himself." She looks at the list. "He'd better behave himself around Luna, too. If he calls her Loony, he's out."

Once she's back in her own room and her heart rate has slowed to normal, she realizes with horror that she lost the argument. She was so dazed by lust that she didn't even make an argument.

Worse, there may have been far more mere name-calling between Draco and Luna. Who knows what he might have done to her when she was a prisoner at the Manor? Neville is a boy, so maybe that possibility didn't occur to him. Certainly, he's an innocent. And just because no such incident has turned up in the Pensieve depositions doesn't mean that it didn't happen.

She will _not_ have a repetition of the appalling experience with Madam Rosmerta. She will not permit her own carelessness to bring on flashbacks for someone else, nor will she let Neville in his innocence and forgetfulness do any more damage.

She resolves to have a talk with Luna, in private, even if it means a visit to the Burrow.

***


	22. Chapter 22

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

For the first time, Hermione feels her lifeline playing out, the golden thread that she's doubling back on itself. Three lives, running in parallel, one in her parents' house in suburban London, one at a castle in Scotland that's invisible to all but a handful of the population, one in a bureaucratic beehive below the streets of London. And there's the world of sleep, too, but she prefers not to think about that. She knows better than to try to fool Minerva McGonagall, but the ratio of sleep to work is running maybe one to four, which is less than five hours out of twenty-four.

Now she's about to add a fourth one, with the NEWTs, but this feels necessary. She needs those credentials, of course, but even more she needs a sense of her old self back: the one who's a student, the one who need only perform brilliantly on an exam to prove that she's real, that she counts as much as the others.

***

It's actually some days before Hermione can arrange a chance to talk to Luna—three days, by the calendar of the world, but more than a week and a half by her own. In the meantime, the owls fly back and forth, bearing letters. Hermione is grateful once more to McGonagall, for if she weren't living at Hogwarts she wouldn't have access to an owl or to the Floo network.

She can't ask the real question by post, of course, and she isn't even sure how she's going to ask it in person, but in the meantime, along the way to arranging a meeting, she asks other questions, or rather Luna understands the pauses in her letters as questions and replies to them.

Luna's father is under house arrest and the Ministry has not yet given permission for rebuilding to begin at the Lovegood house. He is in good spirits, though, and she visits him a few times a week.

On the day after the battle, Luna had gone to the ruined tower and extracted a single thing: her mother's notebook of experimental spells.

There's a spell her mother invented, to enchant a Muggle painting into a wizarding one. In particular, no blood or bone are required for living portraits, only ordinary art materials. When she was a small child, her mother had taught her how to bring little line drawings to life, and promised that when she was grown up, she could learn the charm for paintings.

She thinks that her mother would consider her grown-up now.

James Abbot McNeill Whistler could see Wrackspurts. Luna knows this because they are nearly completely absent from his paintings, in spite of the terrible infestation of them in the London of his time. It's an artist's choice, of course, what he includes in his paintings.

She regrets that the embargo prevented her and Dean from going to the Detroit Institute of Arts to see Whistler's rocket painting, though there's something menacing in it, at least in the reproductions, that reminds her of the Battle of Hogwarts.

You can get to North America by short-hop Apparition through the islands that ring the once-rich fishing grounds of the North Atlantic. Dean told her that this is the likely route that the Vikings took to reach the New World. The two of them had worked out an itinerary for their jaunt, studying illustrated geography books, and had been about to set out when the word came down from the Ministry that foreign travel was interdicted for the foreseeable future.

She loves the _Nocturne in Blue and Silver (Chelsea), _and is glad that it lives most conveniently in London.

The sea, seen from Shell Cottage, is the most beautiful sight in the world, and she thinks that she healed faster in the presence of its blues and greens. She loves the color blue more than any other, and on account of that she's always been glad that she was Sorted into Ravenclaw House.

She still visits Mr. Ollivander twice a week, just as she visits her father.

Mr. Ollivander thinks she ought to become a wandmaker, because of her natural feeling for magical creatures and a certain receptivity to their energies. She is not sure; she would still like to travel the world in search of the more elusive creatures.

Mr. Ollivander is a remarkable person. He remembers every wand he has ever created, and the young witch or wizard to whom it mated itself. Of all the stories of magical folk and their wands, that he told in the dark at Malfoy Manor, the ones she remember best are of her own mother and father. Mr. Ollivander had known that they were going to marry, from the time they were eleven years old, or rather, the wands knew.

In spite of the terror, or maybe because of it, she was reassured that Tom Riddle had been a small boy once. Mr. Ollivander knew who Lord Voldemort really was, of course, because he knew the wand. That doesn't mean, of course, that he understood what had turned a small boy into a monster.

_And what shoulder, & what art / Could twist the sinews of thy heart?_

Voldemort was very like the Tyger.

Hermione is at once intrigued and unsurprised that Luna Lovegood knows Blake. In all her time in the wizarding world, not once has she heard anyone indicate that they know Muggle poetry, or Muggle culture of any description.

Luna replies that there was a little side-room at Flourish & Blotts, which Madam Tonks rented from Mr. Flourish, where you could get Muggle paperbacks. Her father didn't mind, though some number of parents did.

It's vulgar to ask for gossip, and it's rather beside the point of the discussion she means to open when they meet, but Hermione can't resist.

Luna writes that Padma Patil read rather a lot of Jane Austen, while her twin preferred Georgette Heyer. Lavender Brown was uncommonly fond of Lawrence, although Padma kept telling her that the sex bits were anatomically inaccurate. (_Good for Padma, _Hermione thinks.) And Pansy Parkinson got in deep trouble when she was caught red-handed by her mother, coming out of Madam Tonks' with _The Golden Bowl, Wings of the Dove, _and _Fanny Hill._

On the other hand, Madam Parkinson merely _confiscated_ the books, and Luna rather suspects she read them herself. Unlike Draco Malfoy's father, who did a quick _Incendio _on his copy of _Starship Troopers_ and told him he didn't want any further report of his Heir patronizing a blood-traitor establishment or mucking about with Muggle nonsense.

From all this, Hermione concludes that Pureblood teenagers (and their parents) view Muggle literature as quite naughty, either deliciously or indecently, and not to be alluded to in polite company.

***

Hermione looks at her landscape study of the garden of the Burrow in early morning light. Luna has confirmed the impression the picture gives, that she's a morning person. Hermione is the very opposite, of course, but very early morning might be the best time for their meeting. It's already uncomfortable, thinking about what it is she's going to ask, of someone who's always irritated her.

On the wall next to that painting is Dean's portrait of her, Ron and Harry. They're sitting at a table, Hermione between Harry and Ron and a book open in front of her. Ron and Harry have books, too, but they're closed. Harry is playing with a Snitch and Ron has a chessboard propped on top of the volume in front of him. Dean must have done the original studies at the Gryffindor table back in sixth year; the background is vague but something in the quality of the light suggests the Great Hall.

They're sitting close together without actually touching, but the spaces between them imply the relationships. The way she sits next to Harry is very different from the way she sits next to Ron. There's more space between her and Harry, and it's somehow more relaxed, the way it is between Ginny and Ron. The space between her and Ron is narrow and charged. Her right hand is out on the table next to her book, poised to turn the page, and Ron's left hand is next to it, nominally steadying the chess set on its pedestal. Her hand does not touch his, but she can see the tension that wants to close the gap.

Looking at that picture, she's looking at the unreachable past. Unlike Luna's charmed picture, which shimmers with movement and light, Dean's picture is classic Muggle art—using static means to suggest the breath of life. The three figures are made of pencil, India ink and watercolor, but she constantly forgets that, as their eyes meet hers. She can hear the wings of the Snitch beating against Harry's half-closed hand and smell the grassy-spicy smell of Ron's hair. It gives her a pang every time she looks at it, but it's too beautiful to put away.

Dean's other picture, the study of Blaise and Draco playing chess, hangs in another room entirely—in the other world. At Hogwarts, it would be too politically and emotionally charged to hang a joint portrait of Blaise Zabini and Draco Malfoy on her bedroom wall. Draco is her erstwhile—perhaps still present—enemy, certainly her rival, and Blaise is dead, cut down because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The other day, at her programming job, she unexpectedly came face to face with that picture. One of her programming colleagues has Dean's picture tacked to his wall. He noticed her staring, pointed to Draco and Blaise and said, "That's who we are, love: wizards. We work some serious magic."

Then, rather more eloquently than she would have expected from a programmer, he went on to talk about how that picture haunted him, with its sense of a world behind those two figures, what he'd give to have the book with the story in it, because you look at the picture and you know there's a whole other universe on the other side of the paper.

She explained her double-take by telling him (truthfully) that she knows the artist, that they were children together.

That second part, actually is a lie: that she was ever a child in her time at Hogwarts.

***

The sky over the Burrow is just lightening behind a veil of mist when she and Luna go to sit in the garden with cups of steaming coffee. Luna casts a warming charm and they settle on a bench. The gnomes aren't quite as active as they are at high summer, but one or two gambol across the grass, pulling their usual faces. They don't seem to recognize Luna as a threat, because one of them runs within inches of her outstretched feet.

Hermione casts _Lumos_ and shows Luna the revision schedules, and to begin on a neutral note, confirms that she will be at Hogwarts to revise for Care of Magical Creatures. Luna says, "Oh, I already talked to Hagrid. He was quite happy that one of us was going to be sitting the NEWTs in his subject." She smiles vaguely. "He was disappointed there weren't more of us."

Hermione takes out the roster of prospective study group members. "Which of the other subjects will you be revising?" she asks, and Luna lists them as Hermione puts a check in the appropriate cells in the column labeled with her name.

"Defense will be so much fun," she says. "It will be just like Dumbledore's Army again." She smiles a little sadly. "I don't have my charmed Galleon any more. They took it away when I was in the dungeon at Malfoy Manor."

"Well, that reminds me," Hermione says, hiding how grateful she is to Luna for providing the opening, "There's an awkwardness … well, a sort of problem … with the list for the study groups." She's not sure how to put it. May as well spit it out. "Malfoy's at Hogwarts, and he's revising for NEWTs." Luna looks at her mildly, with no change of expression.

"You mean Draco, not Mr. Malfoy," she says, although the clarification strikes Hermione as wholly unnecessary.

"Well, yes. And Neville …" She has to be careful here, because she's really not supposed to be talking about what Neville has to do with Malfoy. "Neville put him on the list for our study group. For the subjects we'll be revising together." She looks at Luna, who's gazing out over the misty garden and sipping her coffee. She has another flare of irritation at Luna's lack of focus.

Luna says, "Neville always was a kind person."

Hermione says, "I wanted to ask you before we make the list final. In case it bothers you that he's on it. If you have a problem …" She's trying her level best not to lose her temper, because Luna is not catching on here at all, and she doesn't want to be crude. "I mean, you were in the dungeon at Malfoy Manor."

By the firefly glow of the wandlight, Luna's face takes on a faraway expression, and she nods. What lies behind that mask of serenity, she has no idea. From the letters they have exchanged over the last week and a half, she realizes that Luna's emotions are in a completely different key from her own.

_Constant vigilance._ _Know the difference between your reaction and what is really happening._ Her irritation, she realizes, is actually fear.

Hermione realizes that she has no idea how to approach this. Her parents had friends from university who received the emergency cases, the smashed faces and sex assaults, the hideous domestic cases. She knows the crisp, medical way to ask the question… but not how to ask it of Luna, who is not near enough to her to be a friend, nor distant enough to be a patient.

Roundabout, then. She tells the story of her horrid mistake, in letting Neville bring Draco into the Three Broomsticks. "It upset Madam Rosmerta," she says, and then says no more, out of respect for the other woman's privacy. She realizes that if she were not holding her wand in one hand and the revision schedules in the other, she'd be wringing her hands. She's holding her breath, because she realizes that she doesn't want to hear that another of her schoolmates really has plumbed the depths of darkness.

Yes, she knows that there is a continuum from the schoolyard bully to the rapist, the torturer, the concentration-camp guard, but that range is contingent; at every point along the path, one says yes or no.

Luna says in an oddly detached voice, "They did talk about doing things to me." Hermione lets her breath out as slowly and silently as possible. "Yaxley, his name was, and I don't know the other one. And the werewolf, Greyback." Hermione sees that Luna's hand is closing and unclosing in her lap, as if it had a life of its own. "I could hear them in the hallway, and they knew I could hear them."

Hermione closes her own eyes, and imagines that: to be immured in darkness and to hear one's captors talking about what they _might like to do_.

"And then Draco's mother came downstairs and caught them at it."

Hermione asks the question before she can stop herself. "What happened?"

"I heard them scream. She must have hexed them. Then she told them that they were worse than blood traitors, if they were talking about doing that to a Pureblood witch. 'No better than Muggle witch-hunters,' she said."

There's a very long pause. "They were talking about what they'd like to do to Draco_,_ too, because of Rowle and Dolohov. I think she heard that."

"What about Draco?" she asks, half-holding her breath as she does so.

"It was only his house," Luna says. "He didn't put me there. I rather felt sorry for him. He was so scared the whole time." She looks at Hermione. "I think he was more scared than we were, you know."

"Then it won't bother you to see him if we're revising together?"

"Oh no. He was rather unkind when we were in school, but I would imagine he's different now. He never went to trouble to hurt me or Mr. Ollivander." Luna looks at her. "Is he still scared?"

Hermione frowns. This isn't the question she expected. "I don't know," she says. "I suppose he is different. He … hasn't been well." She remembers his stricken expression when she threatened to walk away from the flying lesson. "He's better behaved than he was, I suppose. He doesn't use the M-word as much as he did."

Luna says, "Everyone says he's going to be sent to Azkaban for life. Do you think he'll have trouble studying because he's thinking about that?"

For once, she has no trouble following Luna's train of thought; she's imagining the darkness of the dungeon at Malfoy Manor, extended into the indefinite future with no hope or possibility of escape. Then add in the Dementors... Hermione remembers how Draco crumpled in the face of the Dementor attack in Hogsmeade and how long it took her and Neville to get him back to himself. He might not last long in Azkaban. He certainly doesn't seem to have the inner resources of Sirius or Bellatrix.

"I suppose the NEWTs would give him something else to think about," she says, feeling unexpectedly shabby. Stubbornly, she adds, "I did tell Neville that if Malfoy calls you Loony, he's out."

Luna says, "But everyone called me that." She frowns a little. "Well, not so much any more, especially Ginny. And I don't think Neville ever did." She finishes her coffee.

Hermione taps the timetables with her wand to duplicate them and hands the duplicates to Luna. She receives them with her vague, beatific smile. "Oh, this is good. I'll start right away. It will be good to see you and Neville again." She says, "Tell Draco that I hope he is feeling better."

The light is coming up rapidly now. The hedge takes shape, grayish in the thick mist. Hermione drinks the last of her coffee. "Well, I should be going. Let me know if you have any questions about the schedules." She adds, with one last look at the garden, "I do like your painting of this garden. I have it up over my desk at Hogwarts."

***

She and Luna walk back into the house, and into the lively chaos of the kitchen. Everyone who works at the Ministry is eating breakfast, except for Percy, who must have left earlier. Harry, Ron and Ginny, resplendent in their trainee Auror robes, are eating eggs and toast while arguing about something from work the other day. Arthur is finishing his breakfast and reading the morning edition of the _Daily Prophet,_ as Molly taps her wand like a conductor's baton to the second movement of breakfast.

Molly turns as they enter. "Luna, dear, do you want some eggs?" she asks, and then falls silent as she sees Hermione.

"Oh no thank you, Mrs. Weasley," Luna says. "I had breakfast when I got up." She turns to Hermione. "Did you want more coffee?"

"No thank you," Hermione says. Even if she did want a second cup, she'd decline, in the interests of making as swift an escape as possible.

It's too late, of course, because now Ron, Ginny and Harry have caught sight of her.

***

**Author's notes:** Andromeda Tonks as bookseller I owe to V.M. Bell, author of the splendid _Vae Victis_ (see my Favorites for a link). Lucius Malfoy's view of the literary merit of Robert Heinlein comes from A. J. Hall. Pansy Parkinson's notions of naughty literature: _Wings of the Dove_, for all its late-Jamesian obscurity, is at least as erotic as the notorious _Fanny Hill._ (There is a scene in which Kate Croy and Merton Densher have either tea or sex; after six readings I am not sure which.)


	23. Chapter 23

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

Molly Weasley is looking at her, wand half-raised and the tea kettle madly steaming, as a second round of eggs, sausage and toast sizzles to a finish for Ron and George, the voracious ones. Those hazel eyes are not the only ones on her; Ron and Harry and Ginny are all paused, for all the world like the freeze-frame in a film before they run the credits…

She's frozen for a split-second (_that would have cost me my life if this were a duel,_ thinks the voice in her head, the one for whom the war has never been over). Then she flourishes the revision schedules and the rosters and hands them to Ron and Harry over the heads of George and Arthur and Dean.

Ron stares at his, and smirks. "Color coded, hmm?" he says, then does a double-take at the no doubt offending column to the right, the one with the name _Malfoy_ at its head.

Harry looks at her with one of his _concerned_ glances.

Ginny glares.

It's not one of those but the combination of the three—and Molly's gimlet glance—that does for her. The Weasley clock starts to rattle against the wall, and the dishes on the shelf to do a mad little dance of their own. She can feel it flaring in her chest, that light-headed, oddly spacious feeling like the drop in pressure before a storm.

"You've made yourself scarce," Molly says. Hermione gulps. She's never wanted to kill anyone as much as she does just now. _Made myself scarce, indeed. Well, I suppose I could have made nice with Ron and come back to be a happy little housewife and breeder. But I just don't see that happening. Not then and certainly not now. _

There's a squeak overhead that she doesn't recognize, until she sees the slight vibration in the ceiling joists. Terror lances through her: the whole structure of the house is resonating to her rage.

She points at Ron and Harry.

"You two. The garden. _Now._" They're on their feet before she takes her next breath. No, however much destruction might be wished by the thundercloud now gathering its force in her chest, she doesn't mean to bring down the Burrow on their heads.

After all, she's a part owner.

***

The garden is full of lovely pearlescent light, diffused through mist and glittering on the frosted ground. _English Garden at Sunrise: Impression._ The scarlet facings on the black trainee Auror robes, and Ron's flaming mane are the brightest colors in the russet and faded-green morning.

Hermione says, "Not one more word from either of you about color-coded revision schedules. Or my notorious swottiness, or my worrying about rules, or bloody contingencies, or any of the things that saved your fucking worthless hides."

Ron's mouth drops open at the profanity.

"And if I hear _one word_, and if that word is Draco fucking Malfoy or any variant thereof, I am going to _Reducto _something. He's on the roster. Live with it. Luna is the only one with veto power, and she just gave approval."

Ron glowers at her.

"Neville's idea. If you have an issue with it, talk to him. Only you'll have to make an appointment, because he and I have a row scheduled."

Yes, there's Neville. She realizes that she's really been looking at him, and speculating, and constantly reminding herself that he's privileged and she's not. She's not on the list. She was marked for death in the late war; he only courted it by turning down Voldemort's offer. Heroic as he was, he had a choice. She didn't. And now that they've won, she's as little respected by the winners as by the enemy. But she's still attracted, and the nonverbal signals she's getting are that he is as well—in which case, how dare he toy with her. _And_ he has career prospects and she doesn't, and she doesn't intend to be anyone's little hausfrau or brood mare—nor his _diversion_ nor his _bit on the side._

But that's neither here nor there, because it's Ron and Harry she's facing. Her friends, or so she thought. Her friends, who stopped speaking to her when she broke off with Ron. Her _brothers,_ if it comes to that, her only family in this world that otherwise means to kill her, if not on the battlefield then from overwork in the Ministry.

Her friends, for whose sake she sent her parents into exile, _and didn't accompany them there._

She takes a deep shuddering breath, not sure where to begin.

Ron is staring at the roster, mouthing something he daren't say aloud.

"You've been revising at the Burrow," she says. "There's no need for you to come to Hogwarts, except for Potions practical, and I'm still working that out with Slughorn. And Justin Finch-Fletchley has a Potions lab in his flat in London, and I'm sure he'd be fine with you revising with him. So Malfoy the younger is _very_ much beside the point."

Harry is looking at her. "But you never see us anymore." Interestingly, he doesn't mention dragging her to lunch at the Leaky Cauldron. Maybe that's still a secret from Ron and Ginny.

"Yes, I don't see you any more. And that's not all my choice, is it? The last time I _saw_ you lot, someone broke my nose, and someone else laughed at me and told me I was rubbish at Quidditch."

Ron looks shamefaced but belligerent—that look she knows so well.

Harry says, in that conciliating tone that makes her want to throttle him, "Everyone had too much to drink."

"Speak for yourself, Potter. I didn't have a _drop,_ unless you count one butterbeer at the end of the day. I was being a _good sport,_ and playing that stupid game you all love so much." She isn't going to cry, for all her sinuses are prickling. "I don't want to hear the excuse that the war has been so bloody hard on you all. I am the one who's living in a cubbyhole at Hogwarts, courtesy of Minerva McGonagall. I'm the one paying off the bloody debt to the Goblins—"

Harry opens his mouth to speak and she cuts him off. "Yes, Harry, I know what your considerations were. If you didn't pay off Ron's share in full, the Goblins would have taken the Burrow. And you have responsibility for Grimmauld Place, and for Teddy, and Andromeda. My parents, on the other hand, are immune because they're Muggles. So it made sense, and I didn't argue with it at the time, did I?"

She narrows her eyes and goes on, "And if I had any doubt, I've seen your financial records." She's never said anything so indecent to anyone in her life. That's tantamount to saying _I've seen you naked._ She has the sense of shucking the shell of Hermione Granger, the middle-class striver, and letting some distant ancestor, some village haggler, step forth into the light.

"And I know what happened to Andromeda's business. Muggle book-selling didn't do too well under the Thicknesse Ministry, did it now? Being Bellatrix Lestrange's blood-traitor sister was just icing on the cake. I've seen the Pensieve depositions. A whole lot easier to do Kristallnacht when you've got _Incendio _and _Reducto,_ isn't it?"

Harry flinches at the word _Kristallnacht. _Good boy, she thinks, at least you paid attention in primary-school history. Ron looks blank.

That's what unhinges her, that blank look. The _force_ in her chest blooms into tempest, and the trees in the garden thrash as if a gale had swept in.

"Muggle stuff, Ron," she whispers in a voice so low and dangerous she can't believe it's coming out of her mouth. "Where do you think Tom Riddle got his fancy ideas? You lot don't pay any attention to the Muggles except to say, 'eklectricity,' and 'oh, plugs, how cute.' Funny animals, Muggles. Your Death Eaters were amateurs, Ron, compared to the Muggles."

Ron is staring, his face dead white. Storm clouds curdle overhead. "Hermione, stop it."

Her vision is black at the periphery and she's feeling dizzy, as if the atmospheric pressure has dropped so far that she can't get oxygen into her lungs.

"Stop it. This is going to get us in trouble with the Ministry!"

The clouds overhead are wheeling slowly, forming something like an inverted mortar, only it's made of greenish cloud-stuff, with lightning flickering in it.

_At least it's not a Killing Curse,_ she thinks. _But it's rather like the color of a Dark Mark. No, not quite _that_ shade of green, but something a little less saturated. _ She recognizes that calm, observational voice as a sign of serious craziness; it's floating a full ten feet behind her head, and its views of the matter seem to have nothing to do with anything she might do next.

Harry says, "Look, Hermione, Ron and I have to go to work. We can't be doing this now."

"Oh right, Harry, the Ministry is going to sack the Savior of the Wizarding World for being five minutes late to work. Or an hour late. Or if he shows up drunk." He's still looking mulish. Nothing so stubborn as Harry J. Potter trying to avoid a confrontation. Face down the major Dark Lord of the last half-century, but quail when it comes to a chat with friends.

Or ex-friends, as the case may be.

"Harry, you've got a free pass. At least for the fifteen minutes while the bastards still remember that you saved their little world." She figures it's over anyway, so she adds, "If I'm still your friend, if I ever was more to you than a convenient walking encyclopedia, then use that free pass _now._ Call it in. Or were you waiting for a _special occasion?_"

Harry gulps, and makes a decision. "Okay. I'll be back."

"Do what you need to do. But we're going to have a _talk._"

Harry runs back into the house. Ron stares at his retreating back.

"Aren't you…?"

"No, they'll know I'm not coming when Harry says he isn't."

Yes, they know already, those people at the Ministry, that Ron and Harry are the true inseparables. That Ginny might be Harry's girlfriend, but Ron is his one and his only, his sword-bearer, his side-kick, his faithful friend, and Hermione is the tag-along girl, the one who somehow ended up in their little group but never fit.

And then, quite unexpectedly, she is saying all this aloud, to Ron. She tells him just how angry she is about how she was treated, and how sick she is of the feeling of being used. It's her first thought on waking up in the morning, that she's nothing to her ex-friends and she's going to have to rebuild _everything_ from the ground up.

And they—he and Ginny—can bloody shut up about Malfoy because at least he's being civil. Whoever it is that's taken over her voice is without mercy: "Yes, you and Malfoy are cousins and it shows. Malfoy wouldn't have said anything different, would he, about cheating the Goblins or stealing from Muggles or laughing at the idea of freeing the house elves?"

Then she's on unforgivable territory: "So why don't the two of you kiss and make up and be happy Purebloods together, and leave me out of it?"

On then, to the heart of the matter.

"And really, Ron, we're done. As in over. So if there's someone else you fancy, God help her but you won't have any opposition from me. But that also means that nothing I do, with anyone, is ever your business again, so I don't want to hear it."

Ron recovers himself, and his color is back, in the form of hectic patches on his cheeks. "You flaunted those letters with Krum—all the things you were writing to _Vicky, _and how he invited you to visit him…"

Absurd that he's bringing up a three-year-old grievance, instead of what happened this last year, how he abandoned her and Harry in the midst of the quest, how he made trouble for them with the Goblins…

"In case you were wondering what I was writing to Krum, a lot of it was about Grindelwald and Hitler, and our grandparents—and the curriculum at Durmstrang, and what he'd read on the Dark Arts, and, yes, practicing my conversational Latin because in Central Europe they still write it."

She takes a deep breath. "And anything beyond that is none of your business. You never cared except to be jealous. Do I make myself understood?"

Dean and George are standing in the doorway, staring up at the wall cloud slowly spinning over Ottery St. Catchpole. George lets out an awed whistle. "Great Merlin on a racing broom, I've never seen one like _that._" He looks over his shoulder to someone behind them in the house. "Harry wasn't joking. She's _weather-working._"

It takes forever for the words to register, or for her to believe that the vortex turning overhead has anything to do with her. She never did believe in that sort of thing, even when she was reciting those words:

_Though his bark cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-toss'd._

The Weird Sisters, _not_ the band.

_The weird sisters, hand in hand,_

_Posters of the sea and land,_

_Thus do go about, about,_

_Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,_

_And thrice again, to make up nine._

_Peace! The charm's wound up._

A thousand years ago in another country, she recited those lines in a primary-school classroom, with two other little girls, turning in a circle under fluorescent lights and waving someone's borrowed drumstick by way of wand, as their classmates sat at desks waiting their turn to recite their bits from the Tragedy of Macbeth.

Weather-working. Crop failure. All the things pinned on the witches, real and imagined. The _original_ Statute of Secrecy violation.

She staggers and sits down on the garden bench, where she and Luna had their talk, what now feels like hours ago. Deep breath now. Slow down. Draw that wild energy back out of the world and into her chest—except it won't go. Now that she's let it out, it wants to be a storm.

"Let it come to rest, easy now, easy." Luna's calm voice, now reassuring. Hermione is shaking all over. She did not see Luna cross the autumn grass, in the eerie green storm-light, and now Luna is sitting next to her on the bench, drawing her down to rest with her back against Luna's chest, Luna's chin on the top of her head. Much the position in which she lay when Neville repaired her nose, only Luna is repairing the world, breathing slowly, singing that cloud back into vapor.

She hears a tenor voice she doesn't recognize take up the song, whose words are not Latin but something older by far, words she doesn't recognize. The two voices, Luna's ethereal soprano and this unknown tenor, interweave, rising and falling in alternation like eagles soaring in a desert thermal. It reminds her of Snape from the Pensieve depositions, singing the Sectumsempra wounds back into wholeness.

Overhead, the cloud loses its solid organization, spins loosely into smoky mist and finally dissipates.

It isn't until the other voice settles into speech that she recognizes it. She has never heard Arthur Weasley sing before.

***

She had closed her eyes, lifted on those voices, as the tempest meekly folded itself up and nestled under her ribs and went back to sleep. Much as she's tempted to do now, although she's lying back against Luna's thin frame; that must be her sternum and ribs against the back of her head, and … and she ought not to fall asleep in the back garden of the Burrow, on the garden bench, except she's so weak, so wrung out that it seems like the perfectly reasonable thing to do, even though there's an unfinished row with Ron and Harry.

Someone is putting a flask up to her lips, and she opens her eyes. It's Arthur Weasley, who's saying something, very far away, about the need of a specific after you do that. His Patronus is on its way to Minerva McGonagall, and she'll sort things out with the Ministry, not to worry.

The other face looking down at her is Harry, and he looks chastened, to say the least.

She's still got things to say to him, though. As soon as she starts to struggle to an upright position, there's strength added to hers—Luna is helping her—and then she finishes the last of the restorative draught (what Potion that is, she doesn't know, but it seems to work wonders because she actually feels as if she has blood in her veins again), hands the flask back to Mr. Weasley, who once more has retreated behind his mask of Molly's husband, eccentric Arthur Weasley.

She has a momentary flash of curiosity as to what he _really_ did in the First War, and the Second War, too, because what she just saw was _amazing._ The man has the gift of invisibility without a cloak, and what really lives behind that façade of silly Muggle-besotted puttering?

She sits up, and is overwhelmed with dizziness. No, it's not time to stand up yet. She can still row with Harry from this vantage point, and really it's much easier now; she has their attention. All she's had to do is call up a Kansas vortex over the sleepy English countryside…

She's still angry with them, she tells Harry, still furious with her so-called friends… although really they're her brothers, if they'd only understand that. They're as much family as she has, and her parents are still in Australia, and she did all that for the _war effort,_ and it's killing her that they won't talk to her, and that business at the birthday party was too much. Yes she's sorry her parents are _just Muggles,_ but they are her parents, and they're human beings, and she shouldn't have to choose between her family and her friends—or so-called friends—and if _Draco Malfoy_ can pull himself together to be civil to her, then surely they can make the effort?

Harry actually looks stricken.

And why does Ginny hate her so? Because there's no reason for it, really. What did she do that would justify Ginny breaking her nose, even if there were firewhiskey involved?

Harry shakes his head; he doesn't know.

"She's jealous," Ron says. She's surprised he's still there; didn't she just send him to hell? Doesn't he have the sense to go?

Harry's goggling at him. "No," he says, though he's looking at Hermione speculatively as he does so.

Ron says, "Months in a tent together. Alone, because your chaperon scarpered." There's an edge of that shamefaced-and-belligerent tone, though the accent is decidedly on the shamefaced. "She can't stop imagining what might have happened. I know _I _couldn't. That damned Horcrux still gives me nightmares."

Harry is shaking his head.

Hermione would do the same, if she had the energy. Harry is thick, and Ginny is deluded, and she isn't sure which one of them exasperates her more. Oh, and Ron exasperates her as well, but that's nothing new. At least _he_ didn't break her nose.

Luna is stroking her hair in an absent-minded way that is very soothing. Suddenly she has a flash of a memory from Dumbledore's funeral: Neville, newly released from the hospital wing and very unsteady on his feet, leaning on Luna's arm as he sat down with excruciating slowness. Luna is a great deal stronger than she looks; Neville wasn't a small person, even then.

She wonders if Voldemort ever came downstairs to question the prisoner, and if so, what she said. If anyone could nonplus the Dark Lord, it would be Luna.

As for the revision roster, well, that's Neville's fault, she has to say, and she gave in to him in a moment of weakness. (She won't say what kind of weakness. She scarcely wants to admit to herself how she was swayed—by physical desire, no less—she who is supposed to be Reason personified.) The difficulty, she explains, is that she can see both sides of it. Draco won't go away, he's a prisoner and NEWTs preparation is practically his only activity, and Neville is concerned to keep him occupied, because Draco bored and at loose ends is a prospect that doesn't bear contemplation.

At the same time, she does remember everything he did to Ron and Harry, and the racial slurs, and the way he very publicly and loudly wished her dead back in second year, or at least wished that on her kind, which is much the same thing. The dizziness and the odd buzzing in her veins help, somehow, to lay out the case; normally it would take more than ordinary calm to think about it… except that Draco has always reminded her of a spoiled two-year-old stamping his foot and saying "no!" to a universe that is mostly indifferent to his pretensions.

On yet another hand, he's a broken version of the pest they knew before, and politically, it would not serve their interests in the long run to treat him so badly that he looks like a martyr. It would only set up the opposition to adopt him as crown prince some decades hence. To Ron, she says, "You're the chess player; you know about look-ahead."

_And so does Neville. _Neville is no fool, for all he's been cast in that role for most of the time she's known him. He's watched the consequences of the last war all his life, and plainly made some decisions about how he wants this post-war to play out.

Harry admits that there's a betting pool in the Auror department on the question of which of the Malfoys will get what sentence, and this far in advance of the official list of defendants.

"As for you," she says to Harry, "you might consider why there are Aurors that can't make a Patronus, when almost all of us in the DA can and do, pretty reliably. Think about that. Stop being such a stupid idealist about the Ministry and its works. You weren't before. Yes, it's your dream job, but are you so easily bought off?"

And funny thing, _she's_ not good enough to be an Auror, but somehow it's okay for her to do the same duties, as an unpaid volunteer teaching the Patronus Charm. No, _volunteer_ is not the right word, because really the Defense Association veterans were _conscripted,_ which should tell him that the war is not over. She's not taking it personally, though, because Dean told her that he didn't get a letter with the offer of Auror training when Harry and Ron got theirs. Once they sorted out his blood status, that letter mysteriously arrived, months late.

And their considered opinion, hers and Dean's, is that the DMLE can go fuck itself—and maybe that goes for the Ministry, too. Maybe the whole bleeding wizarding world, once she buys herself free of it.

… and this whole business with the Goblins has had the virtue of making her think very seriously about the prospect of having children, because of what that would mean for her and what it would mean for the child.

Harry and Ron are oddly quiet, for Harry and Ron. It's almost as if they're _listening._

She talks about the camping trip, and the things before, and says she didn't mind being the research department but now it looks as if that's all she is, and that's all the use they had for her. It's too much, and it's gone on too long, and Ron seriously needs to get a life and move on. She's not going to marry into this world. That much she knows for certain. She _would_ like to be able to live there, in a modicum of peace, and now that she's said what she needs to say, she would like very much to go to sleep.

It's up to her friends to decide if they want to be her friends.

***

**Author's notes:** The lines quoted are from Act 1, Scene III of Shakespeare's _Macbeth._

Weather-working, of course, is canonical witchcraft per Shakespeare and his sources, as well as most demonologies. The characterization of it as dangerous to the solo practitioner I got from a throwaway line or two in A. J. Hall's _Dissipation and Despair. _If we're going to give a nonentity like Malfoy a near miss with the Killing Curse, then the wild magic Hermione sets loose while confronting her childhood friends ought to be _something special._ And so it is.


	24. Chapter 24

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Author's note:** This chapter features cameo appearances by Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling, Monty Python's Killing Joke, a pentagram, and some Polyjuice. (Not in combination; that's somebody else's fic.)

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Undated (early October – cross-reference against St. Mungo's records per Boudicca Derwent)**

I don't remember a lot of what happened after that.

I know that we came back into the house, and there was a piece of my brain saying that I should have let Harry and Ron have their say, and another piece that replied that they'd had their chance, damn it. I don't think I made it into the house under my own power, either. It must have been Luna helping me, and there was probably some magical assistance as well, because my recollection is of floating.

On the other hand, that could have been all of the leftover adrenalin.

What I do remember, sharp and clear as day, is Molly Weasley and the tea things. She'd cleared the table, and made tea, and there was a little plate of her homemade biscuits—the sweet ginger ones, quite delicious if I recall correctly—and she actually _smiled_ at me.

And no, she's not Mrs. Weasley any more, no more than Bellatrix is the late Mrs. Lestrange. We've met in combat, and that's enough to put us on a first-name basis.

To my immense astonishment, she offered me tea, and I hesitated, wavering in the door (literally, for Luna caught me as I swayed); it was so much the scene I'd remembered with fondness, the lost paradise of that sunny kitchen in the late summer, just before departing for Hogwarts how many times? Except it was not summer any more, but a rather bleak and misty October morning, and I was not a child to be enticed with sweets, or for that matter with tea and sympathy.

She asked me something about my real intentions about Ron; I can't honestly say I remember what she said, because the red haze swamped it and I had to take a breath so that the tempest wouldn't reawaken; I could feel it twitching in its sleep.

What came out of my mouth, though, astonished even me.

"So, is that the spread you offered Tonks?"

Molly went dead white. I went on, "I know her mother wouldn't say anything about it, because you're offering her sanctuary for the duration, but so help me God, if I hear one word…"

One word about what… I don't know what it was I meant to say, but I have never in my life threatened an adult. Answered back, yes, but generally politely, for all that Severus Snape would tell you to the contrary.

Arthur turned from the Floo and gave me an unreadable look. "Healer Derwent says you're to meet her at St. Mungo's," he said. Then he nodded to Luna and said, "You'll go with her?" Luna, next to me, nodded, and Arthur said, "Thank you, Luna," nodded to Molly, gathered his things, and stepped through the Floo; behind the whoosh of green flame I heard him call out "Ministry for Magic."

Luna took my arm, and finally I understood what Arthur had meant. She was coming along with me… to work. I shook my head, and Luna steadfastly ignored me. We stepped through the Floo, and it was Luna who called out our destination, "St. Mungo's Spell Damage, emergency receiving."

***

Derwent ignored just as steadfastly all my protests that I was fine, and then I was lying down, on some sort of bed, and there was a circle of apprentice Healers, in black robes with green facings… A dizzy piece of my brain realized that the green of the facings was exactly the shade of the Slytherin House Quidditch robes. Green for the House of the Snake, or the snake on Mercury's staff, which is a symbol that the wizarding world has in common with the Muggle one; that piece of iconography evolved before they closed the doors to my world for the last time in 1692. I wondered if the Aurors' blazon specified a lion rampant. Maybe there was something deeper underlying the old House symbols, and I wondered too where the snakes had gone that Patrick drove out of Ireland.

I counted: there were twelve witches, in apprentices' robes, and then Derwent in her full green robes: a classic coven, or a consultant with a class of medical students. I realize now that I was not in my right mind, because I kept slipping back and forth between the worlds and wondering why they weren't wearing white coats, and how they came to be missing their stethoscopes. The lights overhead were strange, too, and then I realized that there was a pentagram glowing overhead, and the room had darkened, and Luna was still holding my hand, and Derwent was doing an incantation, Latin in parts but a good part of it sounded Germanic, probably Anglo-Saxon if I'm guessing its vintage right, and behind and under it Luna was singing again, and the apprentices would join in from time to time.

Half of the apprentices had their wands raised and the other half had them pointed at the ground; they were all linked hand to hand; something was streaming up from the earth and down from the sky, and _Something_ was running along all of the branching tracks of my nervous system, something weirdly blue (I still see its ultramarine glow when I close my eyes) that was not the agony of Cruciatus but something equally intense; I was the pivot of magical forces being _balanced_ between earth and sky.

Then there was a vast silence, in which I could hear the stars moving overhead and the muttering of the continental plates bumping underfoot, out toward Iceland.

It was broken by Derwent's spell-caster's voice intoning, "_Finite incantatem,"_ in unison with all of the apprentices and Luna as well. Only then did I look up and realize that the apprentices were looking at Luna Lovegood with something like awe, and at me…

… as if I were a rock star.

Derwent then told them that they were privileged to be present on an historic occasion; their History of Magical Healing textbooks would have to be revised in the next edition, because they (now incorrectly) listed the date of the last incident of weather-working in the British Isles as June 1, 1944. And since this hitherto had been a mere footnote, of only specialist interest, she thought they ought to know something more about it.

They were familiar with the Daughters of Hecate, yes?

A ripple of silence, the sort I remember after one of us pronounced the actual name of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, went through the circle of apprentices.

And yes, Derwent went on, such matters could be discussed in front of a Muggle-born, or at least _this_ Muggle-born, who would certainly have qualified for an invitation on all but bloodline.

As they knew, she went on in her medical lecturer's voice, the Daughters had fallen from repute in the time of Grindelwald, given the large number of witches in their ranks who had defected to the Dark Wizard of the Continent.

There was a murmur of distinct unease, and I realized that the majority—perhaps the entirety—of the witches surrounding me were Purebloods, and Derwent was revealing one of their embarrassing family secrets to an outsider.

In late May of 1944, the then-Minister for Magic was approached by the Muggle Minister, Winslow Churchton—

"Churchill," I corrected. "Winston Churchill."

--to guarantee regional weather for the Muggle armies' landing at Normandy. Due to the previous defections, the Daughters did not have a quorum. Instead of the required thirteen, they had but seven. For various reasons, not least the desire to prove their loyalty to the Ministry, they proceeded nonetheless, hoping to supplement their insufficient numbers by using a particularly powerful location: the stone circle known as the Seven Sisters, in Wiltshire on the grounds of Malfoy Manor.

At this point, Derwent referred them to the _Thaumaturgical Survey Map of the British Isles _(Prewett, Weasley and Chattox, 1910).

The operation—inconclusive in its results—killed two of them. The casualties were Messalina Bellatrix Nimue Malfoy, by birth Rookwood, and her cousin and childhood friend, Amanita Rosier. Both witches received posthumous commendations from the Ministry for Magic as well as the Muggle government, for their ultimate sacrifice in the British war effort. It made me a bit dizzy all over again to realize that the archives of Malfoy Manor included a letter signed by Winston Churchill, commending Draco's female ancestor for exemplary patriotism.

There was a murmured question from one of the apprentices, speaking low no doubt so that I wouldn't overhear, which Derwent answered in a crisp and quite audible voice that yes, Messalina Rookwood was in fact the sister of Philander Rookwood, reputed lover of Gellert Grindelwald and author of the regrettable poem _The Pureblood's Burden._

Which, to the embarrassment of the apprentices, she proceeded to recite in full.

_Take up the Pureblood's Burden…_

I recognized the cadences of Kipling immediately, except that Kipling, however one might dispute his politics, is _memorable, _and Rookwood is … regrettable.

Derwent understated it, as usual. "So bad it makes your ears bleed," I might say, if it weren't painful just to remember.

The incapacity of wizards with respect to logic is matched—perhaps exceeded—by their incapacity for poetry. I'd never cared for the Hogwarts school song, but that was starting to sound like Shakespeare compared to this… well, the only thing that bore comparison was the luckily fictional Killing Joke.

(I was seven or so, and Monty Python was on the telly. I didn't understand why she was laughing, so she tried to explain it to me. I got impatient and asked why she didn't just _tell_ me the Killing Joke. She told me that would be too dangerous, and then she started laughing again and inhaled some of her tea and my father had to pound her on the back. That gave me serious pause. If talking about the Killing Joke was that dangerous, perhaps I oughtn't to raise the subject again. It was a proper introduction to words of power.)

By analogy to the Killing Joke, Rookwood's opus was the Unforgivable Poem. It merits a lifetime in Azkaban, except that I don't believe in censoring free artistic expression--and in any case, Philander Rookwood is dead.

And no, I'm not copying it out here. I'm just hoping I won't have to ask Derwent for a therapeutic _Obliviate _when I come back to work.

***

_No time-turner use, either, _she told me, fixing me with a sharp glance to rival McGonagall's. At least I didn't have any meetings scheduled at the bank tomorrow. And my row with Neville will have to wait, because she told me point-blank that I'm not to do anything remotely _upsetting_ until she's certified me as fully recovered.

The apprentice Healers were looking at me as if I were a rock star. Not only with awe, but something else as well. When the lights came up, more than a few were looking at me—_speculatively_, in a distinctly unprofessional way, which is to say that if they weren't forbidden to hit on the patients, I might have myself a groupie problem.

I'm remembering what Derwent had said about the "edgy sex appeal" of wild Dark magic in Pureblood circles. Those Pureblood witches had been looking at me as if I were a rock star.

Now I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to banish the unappetizing image of various Dark wizards throwing their underthings at the stage… which abstract notion just morphed into Draco Malfoy, skinny and stark naked in my parents' bathroom at one in the morning. Never mind it was me, Polyjuiced.

That does it. I'm going to bed.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(the next day)**

There are worse places to be in quarantine than Hogwarts, because at least there's a library.

Derwent made it clear that I'm not permitted to use the Floo, or to Apparate, or even to do spells above the level of ordinary housekeeping charms. Even that I'm supposed to avoid if I can.

And I can't have that row with Neville, because I'm not to do anything that might be upsetting. So that leaves… the library. There were some holes in my understanding of Derwent's lecture, so I indulged myself in a spot of research.

_It should be noted that in spite of (or perhaps because of) her given name, Messalina Malfoy (1859-1944) was the picture of rectitude in her personal life, a pillar of the Pureblood community and an affectionate wife and mother who had trials to bear. Her son, Apollonius Paracelsus Malfoy (1894-1944?), father of Abraxas, disappeared in Central Europe in early 1944, which was something of a political embarrassment due to his publicly expressed admiration of Grindelwald. Such views were losing favor in Britain by that point, as the wizarding public was seriously miffed by the outrages of the Dark Wizard of the Continent. _

--from _Notable British Pureblood Lines, volume 2 (Hopkirk to Nott)_

I have to admit that I giggled over the notion that Draco's great-grandmother was named _Messalina,_ and that it made her something of a prig.

Volumes 1, 3 and 4 of this work, which is rather wittier and more forthcoming than _Nature's Nobility, _also gave me the background on the authors of the _Thaumaturgical Survey Map of the British Isles._ Chattox is Sophia Chattox; Weasley is Althea Weasley, and Prewett is Fabian Philip Augustus Prewett.

It also has an index, a relative rarity among wizarding books in general, so I was able to find out that Sophia Chattox was the sister of the industrial magnate Sophonisba, of Floo System fame. Rather extraordinarily late in life, Sophia had a daughter named Emily, who married one Xenophilius Lovegood. (This Emily is too young by far to be the one in the picture at Longbottom House; she wasn't born until 1948.)

That does explain Luna's mother's love of experiment, though now I'm wondering if the painting charm was original with her or a piece of Chattox family lore.

Althea Weasley appears to have been Arthur Weasley's paternal great-grandmother. Given the dearth of daughters in that line, it's likely that he was taught the craft of weather-working in default of a female heir.

And as far as I've been able to figure out, the Daughters of Hecate are the female counterpart to the Knights of Walpurgis, an old pureblood wizards' secret society that some authors treat as the precursor to the Death Eaters.

_Nota bene_: The Daughters were most emphatically _not_ a mere ladies' auxiliary. Some of their Dark magic appears to have been on a hemispheric scale: weather-working (generally malicious) and large-scale crop failure curses. Additionally, some of them dabbled in Divination as a form of Muggle-baiting. Shakespeare's account in _Macbeth_ appears to be a fictional conflation of several notorious incidents.

I'm finding myself grateful that Tom Riddle was a sexist bastard and as such patently uninterested in _witches' magic_.

***

It's two days after Hermione has received her medical clearance to return to work, and for the last three hours, it has been a perfectly ordinary morning.

Perfectly ordinary until eleven o'clock, when Derwent arrives from her rounds at St. Mungo's for their weekly review of progress on the archives for the War Crimes Trials.

Hermione has been reviewing the previous day's work and marking the list of things that remain to be done on the geo-coding of mass graves discovered by the Aurors. That, at least, the Commission hasn't objected to, since it doesn't involve _naming names._ In the course of the investigations, they've turned up some of the missing persons from the First War Against Voldemort, so she's been adding _approximate date of death_ to the data tables, where it's available.

Dean's father had only been one of the first. There's a map on the wall that now sparkles ominously with the locations of the graves, a fair number of them in the outskirts of London, with little clusters outside Hogsmeade, Ottery St. Catchpole, Godric's Hollow, and a handful of other locales.

She's frowning at the blurry patch in Wiltshire, that appears for a moment when she first looks at the map and then fades out like a dying star, when Derwent enters for their meeting. "I don't know what's wrong with that cluster," she says to Derwent. "The others aren't having that problem. Let me look at the data." She frowns and waves her wand to call up the glittering matrix. "Oh, I see. The location's Unplottable. I keep forgetting because it's the only grave cluster that's inside an Unplottable region. I've only just got it to appear at all."

Derwent looks at the details that hover in the air between them. "Inside the perimeter of Malfoy Manor. Interesting." She says, "Well, that won't be a problem for long, as it happens."

Hermione says, "I tried everything I could think of. Did you come up with something over the weekend?"

Derwent says, "No, but as it happens…" She says, "This will be easier over tea. We have a special assignment in a few weeks that's going to resolve your mapping problem." She summons the refreshments and they repair to Derwent's desk, where she pours the tea and offers Hermione the plate of biscuits. "I just found out this morning, and I thought we should talk well in advance. I didn't approve of the decision to involve you, but there are considerations other than…" She bites off the thought, apparently unable to conclude it in an appropriate way. "I will be going to Malfoy Manor to participate in the Decommissioning, and they have asked me to bring you with me."

"What will I be doing there?"

Derwent frowns. "They have requested you as an observer. There will be an official report, but you're not required to contribute anything to it. The secretary of the Decommissioning Task Force will have primary responsibility, and both I and the Engineering Consultant will be writing case notes."

Hermione still isn't enlightened, and the thought of visiting the Manor does not appeal to her, to put it mildly. "Well, if I'm not really needed… unless there's something I'd learn…"

"Politics," Derwent says. "Your presence is requested for its own sake, or rather, for the message it will send to certain parties. Specifically, the Manor's proprietors." Hermione involuntarily shivers. Derwent says, "You'll remember a conversation we had about ethical conflicts. As your Healer, I cannot approve of this request. I do not think it will be good for you to revisit the scene of trauma quite so soon, and certainly not when no real professional purpose is served by your presence. Most of the Decommissioning will occur out of your sight, and there's nothing that you won't be able to learn from the documentation. On the other hand, I'm under orders from the War Crimes Commission, and they outvoted me on this."

"Which means I'm going to the Manor, and…"

"And you'll be observing the proceedings, under my nominal supervision. The Decommissioning will take approximately six to nine hours, and will conclude by midnight. The Manor's blood defenses will be de-coupled from the blood of the Family. At the same time, we will be altering the defenses, so among other things, the Manor will no longer be Unplottable. Which solves your programming problem, among other things." She says, "It's actually quite historic, as a matter of fact. The Manor is the last location in Europe with blood defenses of its type. Circa 1620, I believe, which means no original documentation."

Hermione thinks back to primary school history and History of Magic. "Before the Statute of Secrecy, in the reign of James the First. Nobody's going to be writing down anything that could be construed as documentation of sorcery."

"Yes, which means that it's a tricky matter to Decommission it. Hence the extensive preliminary surveys, the Healer in attendance, the Engineering Consultant, and a temporary Floo connection directly to the St. Mungo's Spell Damage department. You will be given the protocols for all contingencies, and I will expect you to leave immediately if there is any question of the situation going bad." She adds with a wry grimace, "Although I am assured that the Auror Department has already removed everything from the premises that has the remotest suspicion of being a Dark artifact. Along with most of the other property in the house, just to be sure."

Hermione says, "So if there's a nonzero risk of it going bad, and I'm not needed there, why are they asking you to bring me along?"

"For precisely the reason that, as your Healer, I would prefer you not go. You were tortured there, in the presence of the Malfoy family." Derwent takes a considering sip of her tea. "So you will be there as a witness to their penultimate humiliation."

"Penultimate?"

"The ultimate, of course, being the war crimes trials themselves. Which, between you and me, will put all three of them in the docket." Hermione nods; she'd guessed as much. Officially, they are months from the final list of defendants, but it's already clear who will be on it: the Malfoys and Dolores Umbridge, and few others besides.

"So why me in particular? I mean Ron and Harry were there too."

"Mr. Weasley and Mr. Potter are needed elsewhere by the Auror Department, and Kingsley Shacklebolt was quite firm with the Commission on that point. We are, after all, in a state of emergency. On the other hand, that left you, and the Commission was unreceptive to arguments about mental health."

"Well, better me than them," Hermione says with decided false cheer, taking a biscuit. They're even nicer ones than usual, which for Derwent is saying something. (What's the branch of divination that lets you tell bad news from the quality of refreshments offered? She supposes that it would have limited application.) "After all, I'm under expert supervision and they're not." She adds, "I think Ron would have a bad time of it."

Derwent says, "The only concession I wrung out of them is that you will not have to come to work the day after. I will be seeing you that day at St. Mungo's. Your appointment is already scheduled." She adds, "You understand that all of this is secret information, in particular as you are in regular communication with a member of the Manor family."

Hermione nods. Interesting how they're both avoiding naming names.

"There is one bright spot for you. The Engineering Consultant will be there, and I've indicated to her that you expressed interest in her work when you reviewed the Pensieve depositions of her preliminary assays of the Manor and the Snape house at Spinner's End. She'll be otherwise occupied during the Decommissioning, but you'll have the opportunity to make note of your questions and to set up a time to talk with her." She adds, "A rare opportunity. She's usually fairly curt with questioners and she hasn't taken an apprentice in forty years. When I mentioned your name, she was immediately interested in talking to you. I believe she already knows you, if only by reputation."

Hermione thinks there might be some point to fame then, if someone besides Rita Skeeter is paying attention to what she's doing.

***

She's going to spend six to nine hours at Malfoy Manor, no doubt in the presence of the Family, which means Lucius and Narcissa at a minimum, and according to the protocols that Derwent just gave her, in the very room in which she was tortured.

And all she can think about is what she's going to wear.

It's insane, of course, but the thought won't leave her head, and she can't sleep. Finally she gets up and casts _Lumos_ so she can paw through her scanty wardrobe. No, student robes won't do. She does not want to look like a student. Not the periwinkle dress robes, either. Those are formal enough, but far too festive, and they make her look young and rosy, which is very definitely not the right look.

She's going to be facing her former tormentors and she wants to look scary, formal, official and _adult._ Not to be trifled with. Minerva McGonagall crossed with a ninja, say.

It will be mid-to-late October, and what she remembers of the Manor is that it's drafty, so she'll want a layer under her robes. Her own Muggle clothes (what she thinks of as civilian clothes) are much too colorful. Pretty colors are definitely out.

This is not a party.

Damn. Not a thing in here. Finally an invitation to the Malfoys' that doesn't involve being on the receiving end of Unforgivable Curses, and she doesn't have a thing to wear.

It's only then that she remembers the cache of clothes from Tonks, most of which she shoved into the wardrobe and never looked at again. There are the black jeans she wore to Harry's birthday party. Aha. Those would do…

***

She pulls out the whole lot on the bed and has a look. Yes, there are the black jeans, and Tonks had a whole lot of other things in black, too.

Can't sleep—why not pretend to be a normal teenage girl and try on clothes?

As she goes through the pile, she knows that some of them are things she'd never wear: the short black skirt, the leather jacket with the zippers (not her style, and someone would tease her about trying to look like Sirius Black), the striped tights, the combat boots. She realizes that as a student she only saw the more conservative end of Tonks' wardrobe. No wonder she blended in so well in the London of the punks and the art students.

She can't very well wear these clothes to work, or anywhere near it. She'd never hear the end of it, and some of them are too obviously Tonks' clothes.

Certainly she's not showing up to Malfoy Manor in a black miniskirt and black leather jacket. Oh yes, and Doc Martens (not her size, anyway). She laughs at the thought, though, remembering Draco goggling at her in the tank top and jeans. The sight of actual legs would probably stop his heart. Not that this would be a bad thing. (Think of it, a fashion statement that doubles as a Killing Curse!)

For the first time she considers how Draco might have reacted to his half-blood girl cousin with the decidedly Muggle style—make that punk-boho Muggle style. She giggles at the picture of Tonks saying, "Wotcher, Draco." She can't imagine any reaction on his part that doesn't involve gulping, squeaking, or something similarly undignified. The infamous sneer wouldn't have held up too well in the face of Tonks' cheerful indifference.

There's that purple tank top, which still feels jaunty and sexy. She's pretty sure she wouldn't have flirted with Neville at Harry's birthday party if she hadn't been wearing that.

Flirtatious is _not_ the mood for visiting the Manor, and besides it doesn't have sleeves.

Then she sees the black furry tunic, long-sleeved and high-necked, soft and fluffy as cashmere, unnoticed at the bottom of the stack--dating from when? She doesn't ever remember seeing Tonks wear this, and it's actually quite an elegant garment. It would work as well with black silk trousers, a pencil-slim skirt, or jeans—or as a discreet under-layer under black dress robes. She holds it up in front of the black jeans. Yes.

Part of its elegance is its ambiguity: it passes equally well as wizarding or Muggle couture.

Except it's covered in characteristic, wildly colored hairs. Blue, pink, turquoise, green. They glow like stars against the dense black of the fabric.

Not a domestic goddess, was Tonks.

Idly, Hermione starts picking the hairs off by hand. There's a galaxy of them, and now she knows why this tunic was at the bottom of the stack. Tonks must have worn it a few times and then realized that it would require regular grooming, whether by hand or by spells. She wasn't up for the task so she let it languish at the bottom. It must have been a gift from someone who didn't know her well, or someone who did and had hopes. Perhaps her mother. Tonks said her dad was a right old slob, and that she took after him.

Not far into the task, Hermione remembers the _other_ use for hair and is glad she didn't just Vanish the lot of them. She takes out a file envelope and carefully drops each hair into it.

(Only the wildly colored ones. There are auburn hairs as well, and pale brown ones, and blond ones, but she sets those aside. For the purposes of her files, she wants to be sure that she's dealing with Tonks. Instincts of a Dark magician, indeed.)

Once she's finished the laborious task of grooming the tunic, she pulls it on over her head, puts on the black jeans, and stands in front of the mirror. Oh _yes._ Puts on a set of plain black robes. Yes. That's it. Minerva McGonagall crossed with a ninja. With a little help from Tonks. All in black, which makes her face look pale and austere. Yes. Officially in mourning for everyone that died because of Lucius Malfoy and his political arrogance—and wearing the clothes of one of those victims, Narcissa's disowned niece. Oh _yes._ She feels armored in this outfit, protected by an honor guard of the war dead.

And it's warm besides.

***

It's a day or so later, and she's trying on the same clothes in front of the mirror in her room at home—well, at her parents' house—for reasons she won't admit just yet.

She puts on the most unlikely of the ensembles—the black skirt, that scarcely comes to mid-thigh on her (and would have been even shorter on Tonks, who had a couple of inches on her)—and the elegant black tunic.

Looks at herself in the mirror. It's striking, very. It would even pass in more formal settings—not in the wizarding world, of course--well, if she could see herself wearing it, which she can't, not in real life, she means. With an appropriate choice of jewelry. With black tights and a chain of state she'd look like a goth girl playing Hamlet; with a loop of pearls she'd look simultaneously elegant and sexy, like a bad girl from too much money. The solid expanse of black, the high collar and long sleeves look very severe, and the contrast with the rather extreme expanse of leg makes the ensemble twice as provocative.

Nigel Black would love it, which already tells her she's never going to wear this anywhere he could see her.

She wonders what Tonks looked like in that outfit. And she knows she doesn't have to limit herself to speculation.

She's tempted. Sorely tempted. She has all those hairs…

… but this isn't remotely work related.

Of course it isn't.

She has all those hairs, and from the color she knows that they can only belong to Tonks, and not someone else whose hairs might have caught on the furry nap of this garment.

Remus, for example.

With a shudder, she remembers her second-year mishap—her first Polyjuice experiment—and the rule she formulated then: _Quality assurance now and forever; don't use it unless you harvested it personally. _Or unless you're _very sure _you can tell the difference between Millicent's hair and her cat's. It's really not worth a stay in the hospital wing.

What she's contemplating is a medically unsupervised game, and will remain so.

Not work related. Not remotely.

And as far as recalling Remus to life—well, that's _fraught._ First, because werewolves are a border case she hasn't seen discussed even in the advanced Potions literature, and second, because it isn't Remus who interests her. Far from it, in spite of her third-year crush. He's her legitimate rival; she's the interloper. If you can speak of such a thing when it's doubly posthumous.

This has to be forbidden territory, because she's never seen it discussed.

On the other hand, she's fairly confident it will work. The hair is a snapshot; the pathologist and the mage put it to the same purpose: to capture the moment at which the hair was harvested. Of that point, she's quite sure, both from the indications in the literature and her extensive experiments with Draco's hair. Each time she became a slim pale young man with hair hanging down the back to the point of the shoulder blade, and (she'd checked in the mirror) no cut or scar on the back of the neck. A snapshot of Draco, immediately before the attack.

So it doesn't matter that Tonks is dead. All that matters is that she was once alive.

She shudders, thinking about what might happen with hair cut from the head of a corpse. Well, don't cut it to the root, she guesses, but she wouldn't hazard her own body as the proof of the guess.

That she's even thinking these thoughts…

That she's done the research, cheating a little on the time turner every day…

She wonders what Tonks looked like in that outfit. Remembers her saying, "Wotcher, Hermione." Remembers the dream of meeting her in the café _after the war. _Remembers, with a pang of absence that almost doubles her over.

She's likely on forbidden ground, she thinks, and then decides she doesn't care. She isn't going to speculate. And she admits to herself why she brought those clothes here, to the place where she has her Potions bench.

She goes downstairs to fetch a tumbler of Polyjuice.

***

**Author's notes:** The Seven Sisters and the date for the blood defenses of Malfoy Manor come from A. J. Hall. Philander Rookwood's Unforgivable Poem is my unfortunate invention.


	25. Chapter 25

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – early October 1998)**

There's a peculiar tension to waiting for a fight, when you know that you're going to have the fight and the other person does not.

Neville does not know that I mean to have a row with him about Malfoy, and the study group, and the whole question of his intentions toward me—Neville's, that is, not Malfoy's. Malfoy's intentions are simple, it appears: to be inconspicuous, to study for his NEWTs, and to annoy me from time to time for amusement.

So, paradoxically, I look at Neville and feel a tenderness for him in his ignorance of the storm that is going to break over his head once I have cleared space in my calendar to have a proper argument with him. It's actually rather embarrassing, for once or twice he has caught me looking at his face, tracing its lines as he reads or eats breakfast in the Great Hall. The tension of a row anticipated is very like love, like the giddiness in your chest at the thought of declaring yourself to the one you adore, or at least inviting him to stroll with you in Hogsmeade.

It's all so Victorian, I realize: asking someone his _intentions_, counting up _marriageable prospects,_ even this whole system of debts of honor. No, the debts of honor feel archaic: as if we were medieval Icelanders reciting the sagas by a winter's fire while sharpening the axes with which we will do battle in the spring, having nourished our grudges in the sub-arctic dark.

So I'm reminded, as the roster turned up this week with a defacement. I had been quite pleased with myself for the clever bit of spellwork that will cascade changes on one copy to all the copies—until I looked at the roster this morning and saw that the designation 'Hogwarts' above Malfoy's name had been lined through and 'Azkaban' written there.

It felt like a punch in the stomach, and it's not even me.

Ron did it, of course, speaking of ancient blood feuds. Harry really doesn't give a rip, as far as I can tell. The morning after the battle, he returned Malfoy's wand to him, getting a sneer in return. But then to be fair, Harry arrived to do this grand act of chivalry just as the Aurors were preparing to take Lucius and Narcissa away to intern them in Azkaban. Lucius was embracing his son for what was probably the last time (and may in fact have been the first time as well), and it was more than clear that Draco was both moved by this attention from his father and mortified that Harry had witnessed it.

(Interesting, how I always call Malfoy by his surname when I speak to him, but when I think about him, half the time I'm thinking of him by his given name, although we've never been friends and probably never will be.)

Oh yes, and let's not forget the _Daily Prophet _photographers, who have been Harry's nearly constant shadows ever since the end of the war. (I almost wrote, "since we won the war," but that's rather too optimistic.) What was life like before, when we didn't have to dodge the tabloid press of the wizarding world?

In any case, it's completely out of bounds for Ron to jeer at him about Azkaban. There is nothing funny about the tower in the North Sea; I certainly remember Sirius Black's remarks on that subject—more, I remember the dead expression on that ravaged face when the subject came up.

Why I'd thought that was a clever bit of spellwork, I'm not sure. I'd been thinking about the possibilities for communication, not how best to facilitate an exchange of insults between Ron and Draco. Now I'm fully expecting to come home from work and find Ron's name lined through and replaced with 'Weasel,' and 'the Burrow' with 'pigsty' or 'bin'. It's so predictable it just makes me grind my teeth.

So that's another piece of trouble, thanks to Neville Longbottom and his chivalry.

***

It feels quite strange now, studying for the NEWTs. So much that I've learned in the last two years is not in there. We will not be asked about the Horcrux, though there was little I've contemplated more; nor will we be asked to do a Protean Charm nor a shrinking charm, though sub rosa, with an expression of great amusement, Minerva McGonagall gave me to understand that my packing charms for the Great Horcrux Hunt have set off a major fashion revolution. In particular, young Pureblood witches are competing to make the tiniest, daintiest, most capacious charmed reticules, with my blue beaded bag as the unspoken standard.

To understate the case, I'm no longer a student. Yes, I am studying ordinary magic with the purpose of passing exams, but I just pulled off something that killed the last two witches who tried it, both of whom were Pureblood elders at the peak of their powers. (Messalina Malfoy was over eighty, and her cousin Amanita Rosier was of similar years.)

Derwent told me in no uncertain terms that my weather-working was _classic_ Dark magic: I was standing on very magical ground at the Burrow, and channeling the earth magic using my body as the wand. Not a bright idea, especially not solo. I was just lucky that there were two people there who knew how to reverse it—because it took both of them to stabilize the situation.

And what else she said, with a look of warning: that I might find myself getting _offers_ that might not otherwise have come my way.

I wasn't quite sure what she meant, or rather I didn't want to admit that I suspected.

She clarified: it wasn't likely that any of them would actually know what had happened, because the Ministry certainly wasn't going to noise it about, but they would sense it; Purebloods were like that, and I should be prepared for things to be quite different.

I narrowed my eyes and said, "What do you mean, _Purebloods are like that_? Aren't you a Pureblood?"

She looked at me as if I were just now getting the point. I was shocked. I thought it might be taken as rude (and in fact I half meant it so after fifteen minutes of mystification and nonsense), because I personally think blood status is pernicious nonsense and to inquire after it nothing short of indecent.

Once more, I'd guessed wrong.

And then I bethought myself of the thing for which _Pureblood witch_ is a shorthand: before me stood a woman whose family had lived on the other side of the wall of the Leaky Cauldron for _three hundred years. _What had they missed? A good piece of the Renaissance, the scientific revolution—in fact, it occurred to me in a flash that the scientific revolution might not have happened without the Statute of Secrecy keeping all that noise out of the data—the industrialization of England and the Continent, two world wars.

She sounds not too different from anyone I'd meet on the outside—in the real world, in my parents' world, visiting their surgery—but she _heals with magic,_ and no doubt some number of Derwents were caught up in the witch hunts. Nearly every wizarding family, I am learning, has some atrocity story that they cherish like a talisman. _That's why we built the wall. That's why we closed the doors on them and decided to live among ourselves alone. _ As if to convince themselves that this was the right and natural thing, to live apart from one's kind.

Because what else had they been asking me to do? And what else had I done, year after year, but to grow more distant from my parents? Some of that was the war, and before that the excitement of finding _my own,_ but now I was thinking about getting off the plane in Australia and seeking them out, and what I would find… what would confront me now, after almost two years away. The trials don't start until the ides of March, and won't conclude until May Day at least. If I know the Ministry, it will be midsummer before anything happens on the official front, and of course there are the foreign Ministries to consider.

I sighed. Meanwhile, I supposed that Derwent was telling me I might have some trouble from witches or wizards who fancied me for my post-traumatic stress. Because that's all this was, the presentation of PTSD in wizarding folk. Not enough of us with my clinical profile to run a decent randomized trial…

"That's correct, in essence," she said. And my discipline was going to be to exercise _constant vigilance,_ per usual, to be sure that I didn't permit any of that to flow through me again: neither earth nor sky, because those were forces with which one trifled at one's peril. It was neither the Ministry nor the Muggles that I need fear, but the recoil from what I might call up. There was a reason that they called it _Dark_ magic: as in darkness and chaos over the waters, the unbroken night before creation.

As it was, the Muggles were going to be talking about the last one for days. There are Muggles in Ottery St. Catchpole, and some number of them might have been up early to see that vortex turning over the village. On the other thing, there have been any number of odd things over the last two years, and unusual weather is the very least of it; at least a wall cloud is a natural phenomenon, unlike the Dark Mark, say.

And being English, I suppose that the Muggles had gotten used to it with the usual shrug of resignation; that certainly had happened on the wizarding side of the border.

_Giants stomping through the countryside: that's just going to increase our commute time. Bother._

_Werewolves roaming in packs: no more romantic moonlight strolls, but young folk can get acquainted while patrolling the perimeter of a full moon night. There's nothing like a spot of adrenalin to get other hormones flowing as well._

_Soul-destroying monsters or wraiths turning up in packs in broad daylight: I suppose that will keep those bothersome children in the Defense Association busy teaching the Patronus Charm. Better that than to have them plotting revolution…_

I startled, realizing that likely was the reason we were all being drafted into the civil defense. Otherwise, we might well be thinking how to bring down the Ministry, though frankly I didn't see Harry as the wizarding world's answer to Lenin or Che Guevara. Because it really was Harry they were concerned to buy off or neutralize.

And I wasn't going to be able to have that row with Neville yet because we were teaching the Patronus Charm to the Hogsmeade villagers and the Hogwarts student body—if you could so designate the ragtag assembly of war orphans and children whose parents were leaving them at the school because it wasn't safe to come home yet. Some of the kids that Neville is teaching in the greenhouses are too young for their Hogwarts letter, nine- and ten-year-olds; the ones younger than that are being fostered in wizarding families.

***

The first civilian Patronus training for Hogsmeade and environs is held in the Great Hall at Hogwarts in the first weeks of October. Hermione and Neville find themselves teaching a group composed of villagers from Hogsmeade as well as the war orphans and some of the refugees staying at Hogwarts. What's disconcerting is not so much that they're teaching, but that some of their students are decades older than they are.

Not half an hour into the lesson, Hermione realizes that Neville is by far her superior as a teacher. The Patronus Charm had actually come quite easily to her, and it's very hard for her to explain the visualization.

She doesn't learn so much as overhear.

"You have to think of your happiest memory." Neville is sitting on the floor with three of his greenhouse children around him, all in duelist's stance with their wands ready.

The little girl with the reddish hair and the sea-green eyes extends her wand. "_Expecto patronum!_" She looks at Neville critically. "But nothing happens when I think about it." Her face crumples a little. "I don't have a happiest memory. They all got ruined."

He says that happiness can visit you at the oddest times, even when things are midnight black. It's a matter of a scent, wind on the face, a taste lingering on the tongue. Neville confesses that his happiest memory has to do with walking outside the greenhouses on a winter day in his third year at Hogwarts. At the time, he thought he was utterly miserable, but there was the watery sunshine on new-fallen snow, and the lush green on the other side of the glass, and the icicles sparkling on the Gothic peaks of the castle, and a scent of pine on the wind from the Forbidden Forest.

He's not sure why it's his happiest memory, but it is.

She frowns, and then there's a look of half-understanding.

He says, "If it helps, close your eyes." She does so. "Now imagine you're really there. We'll try different senses. Start by looking. Do you have a picture?" She nods. "Now open your eyes, and try to stay with that picture." She does the incantation again, with no result.

"Close your eyes again. Are you back there now? This time _listen_ to what's happening there…"

It's _touch_ in her case. "The feel of the rose petals," she says. She opens her eyes, and says _"Expecto Patronum!"_ and the silvery cloud focuses into a fat little pony with a shaggy mane.

***

By the end of the day, Hermione is doing the same exercise with her students, to great success. Nearly two-thirds of the group is able to cast a stable Patronus, a remarkable success rate. The rest will return for a follow-up tutorial in a week.

Neville sends them home with an exercise to try different memories, and all five senses with each. "Sometimes the memory you think will work isn't the right one for the charm. The memory has to bring up _strong feeling. _It's not just what you think ought to be a happy memory."

He tells them to practice and not be discouraged. To her surprise, he tells the story of the Dementor incident in Hogsmeade and how neither he nor the Aurors present were able to produce a stable Patronus, but his friend did it, and that was enough to save them all. (He nods toward Hermione.) You never know if you're going to be the necessary one, so you have to practice, even if you don't think you're particularly good at it.

After the students have filed out of the hall, she turns to Neville and says, "You were absolutely brilliant." He shakes his head.

"I learned it all the hard way," he said. "I'm not clever like you."

"You're a real teacher," she says. "I think Professor Sprout knew what she was doing when she asked you to be her apprentice."

He looks down, and she thinks, _he still doesn't know he's good at this. _ She continues, "The way you broke it down by senses—that's just how I got the Patronus when we were facing the Dementors. It didn't work the first time. Only I wouldn't have been able to explain it the way you did. And what you said at the end was absolutely the right thing. They all remember what you did in the battle, and you hadn't thought you were the necessary one, had you?"

He looks up and meets her eyes. In the slanting sunlight his eyes are not brown, as she's always thought they were, but green and gold. There ought to be nothing particularly handsome about his face, with its round cheeks and snub nose. She could subtract points for that, and for the livid scars across his cheekbones that stand white against the sunburn on the undamaged skin, as if it were not only scar but bone that stared at her. She could feel a certain condescension at the way his mouth involuntarily curls into a smile as he looks at her… except that his face is full of _light_ when he does that, illumination quite different from the sunlight that is striking bronze and gold from his ordinary brown hair.

In the back of her mind, there's still a ghostly afterimage of Ron's bright blue eyes, flaming hair and fair freckled skin (cream sprinkled with nutmeg, she thought one bright winter afternoon). She thinks that even as a very old woman, her heart will always skip a beat when she sees a tall man with red hair. She could always pick Ron out in a crowd…

What—who—stands before her is quite ordinary by contrast, the grown-up version of the chubby, tearful little boy she met on the train. _Not a little boy any more, _she thinks, as she feels a sudden flare of attraction. If she dared, she'd kiss him right now, except that feels like too big a step. This is Neville, after all. She's known him since they were both eleven, and they've been friends all that time. She's suddenly very much afraid of getting it wrong.

And there's the matter of not being on the list, and the fight they haven't had yet…

A woman's voice at the far end of the hall calls tentatively, "Hermione? Neville?"

She looks up, and startles before she reminds herself, _Andromeda, not Bellatrix._ "Oh, hello! I didn't know you were coming up to Hogwarts." Andromeda closes the distance between them remarkably quickly; Hermione forgets how tall and long-legged she actually is.

"I didn't know myself that I'd be here, until the Headmistress returned my Owl this morning. She's been very helpful." She presses Hermione's hand. "Thank you so much for the suggestion."

"Were you able to meet with your nephew?"

"Yes. He wasn't very forthcoming about the difficulties he's having, but the Headmistress filled me in." She frowns. "I'm not sure how much to tell Narcissa. She'll only worry. On the other hand, she already suspects something is amiss."

"How did he behave otherwise?"

"He was surprisingly polite, considering all I've heard of him." She laughs ruefully. "Quite a bit better behaved than the last time I saw him, for certain. And rather taller."

They walk out to the entrance hall. Andromeda is going back to the Burrow after stopping in Hogsmeade for some shopping.

Hermione looks sidelong at Neville as they walk back to the apprentices' corridor. She's biting her lower lip, thinking about how she might make some sort of gesture that says "I'm attracted to you," without being quite so—well, blunt. Explicit. To be honest, she'd prefer something she could take back if it turns out the feeling isn't reciprocated. She's never been good at this. If it took six years with Ron, how long is it going to take with Neville, assuming he's even interested?

Plainly it isn't meant to happen, at least not that day, because just as she's worked up courage to say something to Neville, they meet Professor Slughorn, who wants to talk with them about hours for NEWTs preparation in the Potions classroom. Hermione stops in to her room to pick up the revision timetables and they proceed downstairs to the Potions classroom. He wants to see the list of students who are likely to be stopping in. "These are just the people in our group," Hermione says. "There might be others as well."

Slughorn nods over the list. "Potter, Weasley, hmm, Lovegood, Granger, Longbottom." He pauses. "Malfoy?" He looks at Hermione. "My dear girl, he's banned from the Potions classroom, owing to the regrettable events of your sixth year."

_Well, at least Slughorn is on my side. _But then he spoils it, fawning over her about how _talented_ and _heroic_ she is, how she might even give Lily Evans a run for her money. Hermione thinks that it's only a matter of time before he spells it out in skywriting for all of wizarding Britain to read, that Hermione Granger is a credit to her race and proof of what a proper Hogwarts education can do to refine the raw talent of the crudest of Muggle-borns.

Neville says, "But the Potions NEWT is mostly practical." He looks at her before continuing. "And we were rather counting on having him in our study group."

Slughorn says, "I won't have him in there unsupervised." From the tone, she gathers that Malfoy is in serious disfavor with Slughorn, not least for the purloined Polyjuice, though she suspects as well for the damage he did to the reputation of Slytherin House.

Neville is undeterred. "He's at Hogwarts under guard. Would it be satisfactory to have an Auror in the classroom with us if he's there?"

Slughorn looks at Neville and proceeds to explain to him, very man-to-man, that the Malfoys are a bad lot, even worse than you might think. Confidentially, in the tone of a mentor sharing a secret with a favored protégé, he explains that it's not widely known that Abraxas Malfoy did not die of dragon pox, but of a Potion that mimicked its effects. He can say that with confidence, because it was one of his students, the all too talented Severus Snape, who developed that particular draught.

Since when has Slughorn been trying to curry favor with Neville the Potions duffer?

Well, Neville wasn't a duffer in Slughorn's class… but "since when" is easy; it's since the Battle of Hogwarts, since the slaying of Nagini, since Neville Longbottom became _collectible_ enough to qualify for the Slug Club.

"I'm interested in fair play, Professor," Hermione cuts in, with her best attempt at a winning smile, "and I know you are as well." She isn't sure if she's more annoyed at Neville and his ridiculous chivalry to the defeated, or Slughorn's unctuous attention to the newly famous. The business of that evil Potions text and Harry's cheating still rankles. (How much trouble could have been averted in the post-war if Harry had just thrown up a shield charm rather than having a go at Draco with Sectumsempra?)

No, Slughorn annoys her more than Neville does; he's the voice of the Pureblood establishment, the liberal assimilationist wing, and that's what decides it for her. And anyway, this is the role she's really good at, the Voice of Reason. Slughorn has to answer to the Headmistress, whether he likes it or not, though of course she doesn't say it quite that crudely. There is the matter of fair access for all students, and of course there's this tricky matter of Draco's status, but after all the Headmistress has made it quite clear to her and Neville, anyway, that it's to be as little like formal internment as possible, because after all there hasn't been a _trial,_ and unless they've ceased living in England, Draco Malfoy is still innocent until proven guilty even if his grandfather was poisoned by his father. Or Severus Snape. Which she doesn't go so far as to say is beside the point, even if it is, because Slughorn does love a good gossip.

And then there's the business of signed photographs for the wall of fame, which she's shocked to hear Neville suggest. Bribery has _never _been his style.

As they leave the Potions classroom, she thinks she might have heard Slughorn muttering about how they most definitely do Sort too soon.

***

Inevitably, it does come to the conversation about the roster that she was hoping not to have, only it's not with Ron.

Draco is shoving the NEWTs roster under her nose and pointing at the legend "Azkaban" over his name. "So Weasley did this."

She nods, and then says, "He won't let go of it, but do try to pretend the war is over." Of course, that's asking too much from either of them, but particularly from Draco.

"As if I could miss that, given that I lost," he retorts. "And Weasley's going to rub my face in it."

She supposes she's going to have to spell it out. "Do you know why he hates you?"

"Oh, no, Granger, I haven't a clue. Do enlighten me." No, she's going to have to deal with his sarcasm on top of everything else. Better to pretend that she didn't hear it.

"There's your constant jeering about his family having no money, the jibes about Quidditch, et weary cetera. Making fun of his mother, which I notice you don't tolerate in the case of your own. But what really does it is what your family did to his sister. That he doesn't forgive, ever."

"What are you talking about?"

"You had the Dark Lord as a house guest, and that wasn't very pleasant, was it?" She's gratified to see him flinch, even though she has used the expected honorific. "Now imagine him taking up residence in your head." She isn't sure an appeal to empathy is the right tack, given to whom she's talking, but she doesn't have the energy to think up a more creative approach.

He opens his mouth and then closes it.

She adds, "For most of a year. Thanks to your dear father."

"So I'm not supposed to say anything back… to _that._" He points to the defaced roster.

"You can if you like, but it wouldn't be wise. It's not only Ginny, you know. There's his brother Bill, whom Greyback savaged, and Fred—gone thanks to Bellatrix. I wouldn't provoke Ron Weasley just now, if I were you." Perhaps the appeal to power politics will work better. Of course, it would be easiest of all if she didn't have to pretend to be the wise, mature, parental one.

She gives him what's meant to be a significant look, and he stares back at her, chin lifted in the characteristic Malfoy attitude. She shrugs; it's simply not worth the effort. "Don't worry, I won't say another word about it. I am not Ron's mother, or yours. I don't have time to waste restraining you idiots from killing each other. Do as you like, and on your head be it."

Maybe Draco will shoot off his mouth, and Ron will hex him to the hospital wing, and then she won't have to deal with him in the study group at all. Really, it isn't her problem.

With that, she turns to Neville to talk about scheduling the Potions classroom, and ignores him entirely. Best not to give the volatile ingredient any sense it could blow the whole thing sky-high; that will only encourage it. The old antagonists will be meeting in this room after all, Harry and Ron and Luna all coming from the Burrow; Dean has decisively turned down the option of doing the NEWTs, at least at this juncture. He's putting all his effort into his art school portfolio and his work for the civil defense.

The last note she had from Harry had a shamefaced tone to it; he apologized for them _drifting apart _and proposed a night out at the Three Broomsticks. It's a step in the right direction, though there's still no indication if he's talked to Ginny about her jealousy, not to mention the other things. If it were her, she'd be dragging Ginny over to St. Mungo's, even if it took a full Body-Bind to do it.

But that's another story.

***

**Author's note:** Neville's sensory approach to the Patronus Charm is based on the exercises of the 'Method' pioneered by Stanislavsky. See Uta Hagen. _A Challenge for the Actor. _ The exercises therein are also quite helpful to writers of fiction.

The fate of Abraxas Malfoy: Slughorn's brush-off of Draco's attempt at flattery, in _Half-blood Prince, _has always struck me oddly. Draco's grandfather was not an old man by wizarding standards, so my personal suspicion is foul play. (JOdell suggests that Abraxas may have been keeping Lucius on a short leash after his all-too-well-publicized Death Eater scrapes in the late 1970s.) And what better candidate for the role of consulting poisoner than the talented Professor Snape?


	26. Chapter 26

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

I shouldn't go out with Harry and Ron and Ginny and Neville to the Three Broomsticks because I always have too much to drink. No, correction, that's "always" with a sample size of one. That's the _once_. Tonight. _Tonight _I had much too much to drink, and I sat next to Neville, who put his hand on my forearm after the third round of firewhiskey, and I knew that meant, _Hermione, you've had quite enough._ I felt quite coherent, though, which surprised me. And what a very married gesture that was, in spite of the fact I don't dare touch him. In fact, I _know_ I had the third firewhiskey because I was having the urge to put my hand on his thigh under the table, and I thought that I ought to slow myself down. This stuff isn't just alcohol; it has a curious numbing property that I find I really like. Numbing, with focus. What more could an emotional control-freak want?

Well, really it was the last one and a half drinks that were on account of Neville. Ordinarily, I would have left it at one, and half of the second, and then let Ron or Ginny take the remains, just as I did at our celebration back in May. Except back in May I was not being haunted by the thought (ye gods and goddesses) that Neville Longbottom is unendurably attractive. It's just _wrong_ that my entire potential dating pool is people I went to school with. They're too much like siblings or cousins seen too often on holidays. I know that people marry their cousins, but still…

When I look at Neville I see, simultaneously, his earliest and latest selves: the chubby little boy I met on the Hogwarts Express, in tears because his new toad had escaped; and the hero of the Battle of Hogwarts, the young desperado who faced down Voldemort and then, _still on fire,_ swung the sword through the neck of the dread Nagini. Both of those images are off-putting. In the one case, it's something like cradle-robbing or incest; that little boy is so innocent and helpless. In the other it's just intimidating: the doomed-but-defiant warrior who's stepped right out of legend. _His strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure,_ so what am I to be lusting after him? And for Merlin's sake, he's sitting right next to me. I'm basking in the blaze of his body heat, and every time my arm brushes against his, every hair on my body stands on end.

The firewhiskey helps with that. A little.

They say alcohol inflames the desire and takes away the capability. I'm still judging the effect of firewhiskey on the libido, especially after I came out of the stall in the girls' loo and… all right, I don't know how to say this, except straight out: Ginny Weasley. I had just finished washing my hands when somebody took me by the shoulders and spun me around and pushed me up against the wall and out of nowhere she's snogging me. Ginny on firewhiskey number three or four; I lost count of hers at about the time that I decided that Neville's physical proximity was frying my rational mind and that a little local anesthesia was just what the doctor ordered.

There was a tiny voice very far back in my head that was telling me about how people commit dubious sexual acts under the influence of alcohol and drugs. I think it was transmitting from somewhere in Newfoundland—certainly nowhere close enough to make any difference in what I did. I cannot work up the courage to make even the mildest and most chaste advance to Neville, but I was wrestling tongues with Ginny without a second thought, and she was running her hands up under my shirt. It didn't feel like an assault, more like fooling around with your girl cousin on holiday. She's tough and compact and athletic and just about my height, which is unexpectedly hot. We fit together, and my hands find that they really like her new haircut. It's cut short, so it sticks up bristly and spiky. Reminds me of Tonks, as it's meant to. I remember Ginny saying something earlier about how she'd gotten it cut like that because the other girls in Auror training were doing it too, and some of them have charmed theirs pink, and, yes, some are even calling the haircut "a Tonks." She's passed into legend already.

And her hair smells like Ron's. I don't know if it's the well water at the Burrow or the soap or maybe my own crazed synesthesia but it's a grassy-spicy smell, the scent of the Amortentia fumes in Slughorn's class. Her hair feels like Tonks' and smells like Ron's. My unrequited crush and my more than requited first love, and now I'm sucking on her neck and biting her shoulder and I'm thinking, _I am going to regret this in the morning. Ginny should not be drinking this much. I should not be drinking this much. _My drunken brain likes Ginny because she's a bad girl, even though she broke my nose. In the middle of groping her breasts through her shirt, I'm remembering how she hexed the hell out of Draco Malfoy and I start laughing uncontrollably.

Ginny asks me what's so fucking funny.

I tell her I love the way she hexed Malfoy back in whatever year it was and how, ever after, he looked terrified every time he saw her. Because really there was a little piece of me that was scared of Malfoy, but ever since Ginny fixed his wagon, I have not been. Not in the least.

She says, if he so much as looks at you, I'll kick his arse.

She elaborates with relish: his skinny, pale, pointed, inbred Malfoy arse. And he will come back to earth somewhere in the North Sea. She giggles. Maybe we can drop-kick him straight into Azkaban fortress.

The radio station in Newfoundland is telling me: _This girl is training to be an Auror, that's Magical Law Enforcement to you--Ministry cop--and she's talking much too enthusiastically about kicking arse. Even if it's Malfoy arse, we're still talking about police brutality here. _The calm rational voice in eastern Canada is reminding me that my parents used to go to protests about that sort of thing--human rights violations, remember?

Except this is Ginny the Quidditch queen and she is a bad girl, which is terribly appealing. The drunken brain tells me that only bad girls are capable of acting on the kind of unseemly feelings I'm having about Neville. And she's my ex-boyfriend's sister and my best friend's girlfriend which makes what we're doing something like incest or adultery—my brain's too confused to figure out which—but anyway A Bad Thing. If I believed in divine lightning, it ought to be homing in on me about now, fixing the girls' loo at the Three Broomsticks in its crosshairs from someplace out by Alpha Centauri, and _zap!_ There goes the brightest witch of her generation, _poof!_ _Sizzle! _Reduced to a greasy black spot on the floor for snogging Ginny Weasley while thinking about Nymphadora Tonks and Ronald Weasley. Some kind of threesome. Foursome, if you include me. (And then there's the voice of reason, which is now broadcasting from Saskatchewan, but I don't think we include it in the count of participants because it's definitely not approving.) Possibly incestuous. Definitely adulterous because Tonks was married and Ginny is too, well, almost. And probably sadistic, because of Ginny's enthusiastic gloating about kicking Draco.

No, Harry's not on the roster, because that would just be _weird,_ and Neville isn't because he's Neville. In fact, Neville would probably be scandalized if he knew what kind of thoughts I had—about him or in general.

But I'm not going to think about that.

Somebody's pounding on the door of the loo and bawling about what are we doing in there that's taking so long. I realize that the wall against which Ginny has me pinned is actually the door. The pounding is making my teeth rattle. Ginny laughs and says, "That was fun," or something to that effect, and then giggles one more time about kicking inbred arse, before we settle our clothes and walk back into the pub as if we'd been about nothing more than answering nature's call.

Neville looks at me with an expression that I realize much later is concern and alarm, and I sit down next to him, rather unsteadily. He puts an arm around me to steady me and I happily collapse into his embrace, remembering how nice it was to have my nose fixed by him at Harry's birthday and how grateful I am to Ginny for breaking it in the first place. I don't know if any of these thoughts actually escape my lips, because I am much too absorbed in how absolutely sumptuous it feels to lean back against Neville's chest. And that's with clothes on. I believe this is the first time my brain actually embarks on imagining Neville without his clothes.

But this is not the worst.

The worst is outside the pub, when we are talking about going home. Well, for Harry and Ron and Ginny, home is the Burrow. For me, it's a little ambiguous, and my firewhiskey-addled brain thinks "the Granger residence" and before you can say _destination and whatever those other two things are,_ I've got my wand out and I'm turning in a circle to Apparate to the downstairs foyer of my parents' house. I'm lucky I didn't royally splinch myself. There would have been nobody to fix me, because nobody had the faintest idea where I was. Two o'clock in the morning (I saw the clock on the wall) and here I've gone and Apparated under the influence, and miraculously landed in one piece.

No, I lied. It gets worse.

I stumble through the defenses and go downstairs to my Potions bench and pour myself a nice tumbler of Polyjuice by way of nightcap, because I'm thinking about Tonks and how I can't bear another minute without seeing her, since I was snogging her in the girls' loo at the Three Broomsticks. And I've got my beaded bag with all of my everything (because Hermione Granger may not be a bad girl, but she is an organized girl), and I pull out the file envelopes with the hairs in them, and I drop a hair in the tumbler. And then I go upstairs where the full length mirror hangs on the wall in my parents' bedroom, so that I can get the full effect.

Of course, I didn't check which envelope I pulled, and when I'm finally standing in front of the mirror after the Polyjuice agony, it's Draco sodding Malfoy who's looking back at me. I think I wasn't finished with the process of getting drunk, because the wires got progressively more crossed. I'm staring back, and of course what's looking at me from the mirror is ice-cold grey eyes and long blond hair and aristocratic disdain, and I say, "All right, if I can't have Tonks, I'll have you."

I don't even want to remember this part, but unfortunately it's in blazing, high-noon focus. That's the godawful part: the bloody focus. The humiliation and the glory of the firewhiskey hangover is the total recall the next morning, in photographic, razor-sharp detail, of absolutely everything you did under the influence, assuming you stopped short of toxic blackout.

I said to the mirror, "Fuck you, Malfoy." In his voice. And obviously, the mirror said the same thing back to me, with the appropriate sneer and snarl, which got me very angry, and also very horny. For the record, firewhiskey definitely inflames desire. Any desire. It's actually quite fortunate that my reptile brain chose the path of sex rather than violence, because otherwise I probably would have broken the mirror with my fists in the attempt to beat him up and then I would have bled to death, right there in my parents' bedroom.

I proceeded to take his clothes off and throw them to the four corners of the room. And then I put my hands all over him and …

I learned by experiment that firewhiskey in fact does not take away the capability. At least not in my Polyjuiced male avatar, who rather enjoyed the experience up to the point where he produced a very satisfying mess, all over the mirror and the floor.

Well, it's not as if I hadn't seen that before.

Then I got horribly fascinated at the idea that I was looking at Draco Malfoy's genetic material and that if I weren't on the vile purple potion I could probably collect it and make myself pregnant with a baby Ferret. Sick, sick, sick. Made me want to scour out the inside of my own skull the next morning, just the idea that I'd had that thought.

By the time I came back to myself, which is to say that a naked and chastened Hermione was staring back at me from the mirror, I was sober enough to Vanish the mess and collect the clothes and put them back on, more or less right side out. And then I remembered that I'd Apparated here from the Three Broomsticks and my friends had no idea where I was. And it was three o'clock in the morning.

Not to worry, Hermione has the time-turner.

I checked my clothes once more, and made sure I had my beaded bag and my wand. Then I turned off the lights and went downstairs to the foyer where I could look at the clock and calibrate the time-turner against it, because I still wasn't feeling any too steady.

I Apparated out of the downstairs foyer back to the Three Broomsticks at precisely 2:02 a.m., which to my friends looked as if I had blinked out briefly and then rematerialized. Neville took my arm, not noticing that I was rather more stable on my feet than I had been, and I didn't disabuse him. We went back into the pub and stepped through the Floo to the Burrow with Harry, Ron, and Ginny. The plan was to sleep it off until we could return by daylight, because the Aurors at the gates of Hogwarts were not going to let two drunken teenagers back in after curfew, even if one of them was Professor Sprout's apprentice and the other was the junior member of the War Crimes Commission, and the both of them heroes of the Battle of Hogwarts.

***

_At St. Mungo's. Just got out of the appointment. It's running together whether I'm the patient or the assistant. I'm here too much. I told Derwent about the firewhiskey but not what I did under its influence. She advises me to be very, very careful. Dosing myself with mind altering substances is the exact opposite of constant vigilance. _

_It's all very postwar, just not the postwar we were anticipating. Lost generation. And it's a bloody cliché. I will not take to drink, whether it's alcohol or Potions. Constant vigilance. There's too much darkness gathering in my—in our—peripheral vision. What if Dementors had shown up outside the Three Broomsticks when we were drunk? Neville was the soberest one of us, and even he wasn't any too steady._

_And for threats only a little less scary than Dementors… well, I ended up at the Burrow, and it was my good fortune that it was Andromeda, and not Molly, who met us coming out of the Floo and shushed us and fed us Sobering Potion before packing us off to bed. It was Andromeda, too, who saw to it that I didn't meet Molly on my way out of there the next morning._

_I don't think I want another night out like that. Firewhiskey turns loose the seriously ugly things lurking in my own head. Merlin help me, I was _admiring_ Ginny for breaking my nose and _laughing_ about her hexing Draco. And mistaking her for Tonks—how drunk was I? _

_I don't like what Ginny is becoming. I'm afraid for her, and I don't think that Harry did anything about that card I gave him when we met for lunch at the Leaky. _

_At least Ron didn't say anything this time. Oddly quiet the whole time, for Ron._

_And what's wrong with looking at Neville? Only that you have some notion that you aren't worthy. He takes the 'Hero of the Battle of Hogwarts' title less seriously than you do. And Ron is not your boyfriend anymore._

She pauses, pen lifted above the page, alarmed by what she just wrote. Not that anybody else can see it; she's put magical encryption on the book. Anyone else reading it will see a collection of lists and schedule notes of unimaginable dullness. She scrawls:

_Talk yourself out of this, my girl, before you go round the twist. _

Hermione closes the book and tucks it away in her blue beaded bag as she hears footsteps in the hallway. She isn't sure what she means to talk herself out of, and it's long since time to go home.

She's mortified to see that it's Neville, whom she hasn't seen since the night out at the Three Broomsticks. Mercifully, he doesn't see her, because he's talking to someone else, giving directions, it appears. Not unusual. Neville knows the layout of the Spell Damage floor as well as anyone who works there; he knows the Healers, the custodial staff, the patients, the regular visitors like himself.

He's between her and the lift, so she'll have to walk by him. Not such a problem until she sees whom he's engaged in conversation. Marietta Edgecombe, who's no longer wearing a balaclava, but is looking off to the side in a strange way. She's talking to Neville, but avoiding his eyes, and, it seems, she's fighting the urge to look straight at the floor.

As Hermione passes, Marietta glimpses her and turns her face away, mumbles something to Neville, and flees for the door that leads to the staircase. No mistaking the look on her face, though, in the split second when their eyes met: sick terror and shame. It's the same expression that she's seen on Draco's face when he catches sight of the children who attacked him.

She remembers what she thought about Marietta three years ago: _Nothing's worse than a traitor._ No, she thinks, there are a few things worse than that. "If you want your major risk as the next Dark Lord, you're speaking to her." How casually those words had come out of her mouth, almost like a joke. Almost like defiance. She wonders what Derwent wrote in the file after she said that.

Neville turns to face her; in slow motion, she sees the light of recognition in his eyes, and then his glance locks on her and his whole face lights up. "Hermione! I didn't see you…" _but now he's glad he did_, he doesn't need to add. Everything's adrenalin-slow, and her heart's hammering because she's just seen Marietta react to her the way that victims do to perpetrators. She can't fool herself about what she did. The curse may be broken, but the damage is considerable.

"Are you feeling all right?"

She shakes her head. _What lie do I tell now?_ "Long day." _Please let him not look at me._

But he does. "You're going home, I hope."

She nods. "Pretty directly, I think." She steps into the lift, and he follows her.

On the way down, he says, "I saw someone we know from school." She closes her eyes, waiting for the inevitable. "Lavender Brown, you remember her?" Oh yes, another ghost. Ron's girlfriend of sixth year, the one he had the _thing_ with. The habit of hatred is so ingrained that she gets a little spurt of fight-or-flight rage before she reminds herself that it's ancient history.

"She's doing much better lately," Neville says. "She had a bad time of it, most of the summer."

Yes, she'd seen Lavender's name on the casualty list in the _Daily Prophet_. She even remembers her feebly stirring body amid the smoke and curse-light of the battle. Greyback savaged her, about the last thing he ever did. It's amazing she's even alive.

"I'm surprised you've never crossed paths with her," Neville is saying. "She's seeing Derwent too. She's down here almost as often as you are." They're walking out the front doors of St. Mungo's now, where the hospital lobby opens onto the disused doorway of Purge & Dowse, the department store eternally closed for refurbishment. As they debouch into Muggle London, the evening is chilly and foggy. Neville puts out an experimental hand to see if it's raining. Nothing dropping, but she can feel the air thick with condensation and a peppery feeling in her nose. It's a filthy London evening in October.

"Anyway, she says hello to you, and asked how you were doing. I told her you were working for Derwent and the War Crimes Commission, and she said good for you. She said you were the smartest of our year and she wanted an invitation when they swore you in as Minister for Magic. 'Score one for the Gryffindor girls,' was what she said." Neville smiles again, and it takes her a minute for the meaning of the smile to register. He's proud to hear someone speaking well of her.

Odd that Lavender includes her as one of the Gryffindor girls. In her recollection, the Gryffindor girls never particularly cared for her nor vice versa. She remembers sneering at Lavender and Parvati for their endless preening and their chatter about Divination and their giggling about boys; equally well, she remembers them looking at her with disdain for her long hours in the library and her bossy manner and her impossible hair.

"Give her my best if you see her again," Hermione says. She steps into the shadows in the alley alongside Purge & Dowse, one of the few locations for easy Apparition in central London; she knows for a fact it has no surveillance camera. She's still thinking about walking ghosts as she squeezes out of the other end of the dreadful compression into the downstairs foyer of her parents' house, and goes upstairs to her old bedroom to finish some programming.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – some time in early October)**

One of the things I am learning is that the things that I most want to know are not in books. My education in magic was very like the education I gave myself on the other side of the border: narrowly technical, more the training of a hacker or a guerrilla than the education of a philosopher. I know how to make things and do things, but I don't know the taboos or ethical guidelines, and I'm only now finding out why it might have helped to know some of those things.

I suspect I'm poaching on forbidden turf. Necromancy is banned, but no one taught us the rules about its imitations.

***

If I do say so myself, I am rather good at brewing Polyjuice. And a good thing too, because I have been doing a bit of that lately. I was shocked the other day to notice that I had significantly depleted the stock I made for my experiments back in July.

Well, how… that's another question. Not work-related, that's for certain.

And I've been cheating a bit on the time-turner, an hour here and an hour there, for my recreational use of Polyjuice. No other thing to call it, even given the agony. The pain of transformation is a test: how badly do you want this?

To see Tonks again, if only in the mirror: very badly. I know perfectly well I'm not resurrecting her, even if I hear her voice say, "Wotcher, Hermione." I'm inside her skin—didn't I want that?—and I can't hear her as I would when she was alive. I hear her voice as she heard it, from inside her head. It has a lovely furry resonance; the echo vaults of her sinuses deepen her contralto with overtones of smoke and whiskey. I look at those pictures Andromeda gave us, and I wonder what it was like to grow up as that little girl, with a Muggle-born father and a Pureblood aristocrat mother, knowing both worlds and perfectly at ease in both. That's what I envy her: perfect ease. I desperately want to know her, and I know that I can't; it's too late and she's gone. I want to ask Andromeda everything that she remembers, and I don't dare, because she's still grieving her daughter.

The other detail in those pictures that haunts me is the wiggly little toddler who grew up into the appalling Draco Malfoy. Well, he was already Draco, but at that point it was just a name. All I see in those pictures is a little creature who's curious about the world and who wants to hang out with his very cool older cousin. He looks no worse than any other two-year-old.

And then there's the other circumstances under which I've met Draco, or rather a simulacrum of him—and that's the other place where I know I'm crossing the line. A guidebook would be nice, to say for certain, "You have now crossed into serious obscenity," which would confirm my gut feeling about what I'm doing. Several times now, I've reproduced, deliberately and while stone cold sober, what initially I did by mistake and falling-down drunk. I've turned myself into Draco and then… well, gone exploring. Call it a practicum in adolescent male sexuality, or the safest safe sex there is. Given my schedule and my current state of overwork-induced celibacy, it's likely to be the only sex I get.

And it's probably safer, psychologically, than Polyjuicing as Ron. Yes, I did think about that, and turned away just as quickly as I could, because that's a place I don't want to go. I still get a little stab of longing when I look at that picture that Dean made. I have it up on my bedroom wall at Hogwarts, which probably isn't the safest place since I see it every day. It's a beautiful piece of work and I don't want to hide it in a drawer. That would be an insult to the effort Dean put into it.

So in the privacy of my parents' bedroom, in front of the full-length mirror, I play solo games with Polyjuice. I put on the skin of someone I never liked, and I pretend that all my base urges are actually his, and then I find out what it takes to bring him off. The mind-body problem takes on a whole new kinky twist: the mind is me, the body is him, and then there's the fuzzy boundary where the two meet. I never liked the person, but I'm becoming rather fond of the body, both for flying and for sex: it's wonderfully responsive, like driving a Jaguar when you're used to a nice sensible Volvo.

It's an interesting excursion in many ways, not least that I can escape my own skin. The fictional Draco is my shadow self: male where I am female, Pureblood against my Mudblood (let's call it the way he would), aristocrat where I am commoner. In real life, he's a prisoner while I am free. Politically, he is (or was) a Death Eater, against my Knight of the Order of Merlin. Dark to my light, which strikes me funny from the esthetic point of view because he's paler than anyone I've ever known.

Last but very definitely not least, he's the bad boy I can have any time I like. Compared, obviously, to Neville who's the good boy, no, the hero, who's pure and off-limits to the likes of me. Playing these games helps me forget what I can't have.

And then there's the intriguing experience of inhabiting a male body, whose balance feels strange, with the center of mass too high off the ground and such frighteningly vulnerable parts right there at the join of the legs. When I return to my own body, I feel much more solid and strong, for all I'm supposedly the weaker sex. I watch Harry and Ron and Neville and Dean now, and understand things about the way they move that never struck me before.

If ever again I do touch someone of the opposite sex, it's going to be a very different experience. Not that it's likely.

***


	27. Chapter 27

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Hermione has just come home from work at the Ministry, and she's standing outside the castle in the open air, which however chilly it might be, is a relief after the claustrophobic underground warren of the Ministry, whose underground depth she can feel in spite of all the decorative attempts to pretend that they're above ground. Artificial sunshine through a frosted window doesn't fool her. She remembers her grandfather's tales of civilians sheltering in the Tube during the Blitz, and shudders, thinking that at least she's not sitting at her desk wondering if the whole thing will collapse in on her.

Perfectly safe. It's all perfectly safe.

Which is why the wartime curfew is still in effect, and the rumbles of fear keep to the casual conversation in the canteen or the tea-room, about what will happen when the werewolves are deflected from all the wizarding enclaves. No one talks about the Dementors, but that's because no one, at any level, wants to think about them; they've been the Unthinkable for so long that no one really wants to broach the subject of their rogue cohorts.

Attendance at Patronus Charm trainings is nearly one hundred percent. Order is being preserved, and people take tea and chat about who met whom at the last full-moon patrols.

The evening is misty, and as she looks down the slope to Hagrid's little hut, she sees two figures turning to say goodbye to the Keeper of the Keys, and start hiking uphill toward the castle. With a pang of guilt, she realizes that she hasn't been to see Hagrid since the end of the war.

There's a starry gleam of _Lumos_ from someone's wand-tip, and as they turn she recognizes the shorter of the two as Luna—and then as they come closer she recognizes Dean, less by face than his height and long-legged loping gait.

Luna has been revising for Care of Magical Creatures, and Dean has come to meet her after, but the real matter of his visit is a question for Hermione: whether Derwent will let him see the Pensieve deposition about his father.

Hermione, who has seen it in full, both parts of it—both the offer and the subsequent murder—shudders. "I don't know," she says. She rummages in her pocket for one of Derwent's cards, the ones that nestle right next to the packet of leaflets for Imperius victims. "You can contact her yourself, I suppose. I don't know if there's a formal process or if she'd just let you come in and look at it." (An edited version, she hopes, because the last bit was horrendous. Surely Derwent would have that much regard for Dean's sanity.)

Dean says, "My mum doesn't have any pictures of my father." After a pause, he adds, "Luna and I were just talking about her mother's painting charm, and I thought maybe I could use it to make a portrait of him."

Hermione thinks of her own parents, and how odd it is she has almost no pictures of them. She regrets that, because she can't remember some days what they look like, and realizes that she never did know what they looked like, because they're her parents.

***

It's late, past curfew, and past the dinner hour at the Burrow. When they meet Neville, coming into the castle from the greenhouses, he insists that they stay for a bite to eat at Hogwarts. It's more than a bite, of course, as it always is with Neville. They end in his rooms, with a feast spread out on the low table and the lot of them ranged out on the sofa and the squashy chairs or the floor, as if they were at a Roman banquet.

Hermione is telling Luna about the portrait she met at Longbottom House, the one painted by Sargent and enchanted into a wizarding portrait, and what she learned about Luna's mother.

Luna tells her that somewhere in the wreckage of the tower is a whole book of enchanted drawings that her mother made for her when she was a child, that talk and tell stories. There's another one, a pop-up theater with landscape backdrops and actual weather, that is enchanted to tell tales from Beedle the Bard. She always liked the folio that does the Tale of the Three Brothers, with the misty river and the bridge and the ethereal figure of Death with his blowing robes and the face that you never can quite see, and the silhouetted figures of the Brothers, whom you can tell apart from their distinctive gaits. Her mother was not only a dab hand at Charms, but a draftswoman of prodigious accomplishment.

Dean wonders, has always wondered, what it would be like to grow up with family portraits that talked.

Neville tells him it's not so wonderful as that, because they're constantly comparing you to generations before, time out of mind. His own parents never had a wizarding portrait made, since it's a laborious process and they were much too busy during the First War. Except for a handful of photographs taken by his Gran, Uncle Algie, and his parents' Hogwarts schoolmates, there's no trace of them from _before_. He knows them only through the testimony of the family portraits, especially the Victorian and Edwardian ones, who had no qualms about telling him to his face how far he didn't measure up to the Longbottom standard.

Hermione is curious about what the portrait of Emily said to him.

"Oh, she was the best of the lot," Neville said, "though she was disappointed I wasn't interested in Quidditch, or Potions, because she was mad for both." He smiles. "She was happy to help me with dueling, though." He goes on to tell them about how she gave him tips, the summer after the battle at the Department of Mysteries, and when he wasn't taking hikes across the moors or driving the van for the Caving Club, he was drilling defensive and offensive magic, throwing hexes down the long corridor that separated the house from the greenhouses.

Emily took a malicious delight, too, in the gossip about Lucius Malfoy landing himself in Azkaban, which pleased her because some number of his forefathers ought to have lodged there as well. And best of all, she'd reassured him that the current Malfoy—Draco—was nothing to be fussed about, for all his nasty talk. "All mouth and no trousers, that one," she said. "If he keeps on, he'll come to a bad end, too, just like his grandfather and his great-grandfather."

It turns out that Neville is thoroughly unimpressed by Horace Slughorn's inside story about the death of Abraxas Malfoy, because he'd long since heard that juicy bit of gossip from Emily. That, and what happened to Apollonius Paracelsus Malfoy: he'd publicly praised the Dark wizard Grindelwald with increasing fervor through the late thirties and early forties, and then departed for Central Europe, where he disappeared. To this day, no one knows what befell him, except that one cold day in the early spring of 1944, seventeen-year-old Abraxas Malfoy came home from Hogwarts for Easter holidays to find that the magic of the Manor now answered to him.

Oh yes, and Emily was at school with Slughorn, so she knows more than a few inside stories about _him, _some of which she promised with a decidedly ribald smirk that she'd tell him when he was _older._

Dean laughs and says, "So are you older yet, mate?"

Neville shakes his head. "No, but I can guess what some of those tales are. She told me that he was a past master at making Polyjuice in wholesale quantity, from back in their school days. And the smirk tells me it wasn't for espionage."

Luna says, "They weren't at war then, so they had time for other things." Her tone is wistful. She's leaning back on the sofa cushions, doodling with her wand; little centaurs and unicorns and thestrals spring to glowing life, like animated cartoons, and frolic through the candle-lit darkness; Crookshanks opens one eye and lifts his head. Luna notices and conjures some cartoon rats to amuse him.

"Ooh, that one looks like Scabbers," Dean says, as Crookshanks stands up and twitches his hindquarters, preparatory to a killing leap on the hapless (if illusory) animated drawing in question.

Luna says in a dreamy voice, "Crookshanks knew what he was about, didn't he?" She rubs him behind his ears, and he flops shamelessly into the vigorous caress. "I didn't like him either, that Scabbers person. He was scared, but that made him mean." She doesn't specify further, but Dean reaches across to take her hand and she smiles dreamily at him. For the first time, Hermione wonders if they're more than friends… as she looks down at Neville, who's lounging at full length on the floor and watching them as well, with his eyes dark and a slight smile, whose meaning (if she reads it right) is approval and longing in equal parts. Does he have an unrequited crush on Luna, or is it only what she has that he envies?

After all, Luna is a Pureblood.

And so is Neville, although when she looks at him lounging on the floor in jeans and a T-shirt, she thinks that he just looks like a boy, well, a young man, and a rather fanciable one, with those broad shoulders and shaggy hair and long-lashed eyes… and one would rather forget all of these distinctions, though there's a part of her brain that likes to keep them, to look at Neville and think _Pureblood wizard,_ because that makes it forbidden… except, of course, that it is, which gives her more of a shudder than a frisson.

She's not on the list.

So when he looks at her and that dark glow is unchanged, except that the smile broadens a little, she's angry at the way that answering desire flares in her, and she remembers the row she meant to have with him. What were the matters of it? Well, including Draco in the study group, and sending her these little flirtatious signals when he perfectly well knows he's off limits to her… why doesn't he chase somebody more appropriate? Luna, perhaps, and if Luna's already pledged her heart elsewhere, then someone from his world. Suddenly she wants to cry, because he looks quite appealing, with those candid eyes and that sweet face that's like pure light, when it's not set in the monolithic stone of moral disapproval.

Life with Neville would be interesting, she thinks. Not quite the fireworks she had with Ron, but something just as heated in its way. Unbidden, her eye traces the line of his shoulders and chest, the way that his wrist casually drapes over the crest of his hip. The flare of the hipbone is visible only as a change in line; he's not lanky like Ron, but broad and solid and, she knows already, warm. Nestled into the curve of his body, she wouldn't feel the sharp edges of hipbones, but…

She's not on the list. He's out of reach. Better to think about something else, if only she could get her eyes to move elsewhere. She's biting her lower lip, and she notices his eyes darken yet further.

Think about the glittering web of data, that delineates the hidden graves. Think about the twisting, branching, elaborated and mutually entwined genealogies of this world in which she is an unwelcome sojourner. Neville and Luna are cousins, not only to each other but to nearly everyone she knows. Dean, now that it turns out he's part of their world, is likely related to both of them as well, for all that none of the three resemble each other.

Think about the fight they're going to have, once Dean and Luna leave for the Burrow.

***

It isn't until Dean and Luna leave that Hermione realizes that it's cold in Neville's rooms. The fire has died down, and the enchanted candlelight gives no warmth. She shivers a little, and then remembers that she's a witch, isn't she? She takes out her wand and casts a warming charm. Neville smiles at her.

"I saw you hesitate," he says. "That's what Muggle-born is, isn't it? Not sure which world you belong to."

She flinches: direct hit.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't mean it like that. I mean, it must be easier for you. No one had expectations."

"Oh," she says, remembering the conversation about the family portraits. "Pureblood, excellent stock, all that. What Voldemort said when he was trying to recruit you."

"Not trying very hard, given that he set me on fire," Neville says. "I could have come up with a better incentive program than that." She laughs. He continues, "You know, Draco is on about that all the time—about how I'm umpteenth-generation Pureblood and still the most Mugglish wizard he knows. They do that in his family, you know: memorize the family tree. He mutters it between his teeth when he's frustrated."

In spite of herself, she's tickled by the absurdity. "Oh, gods, that's hilarious. Instead of counting to ten, he's reminding himself that Lucius begat him, and somebody-or-other begat Lucius, and so on backward, time out of mind."

"And he knows the blood status of everybody we know, and brings it up at the oddest times. For example, he said something the other day about Lavender Brown—"

"What brought her name up?"

"Oh, he was talking about Purebloods, so of course there's Ron, then there's Lavender, and he's saying that Lavender is a Pureblood, so all the little gossips in Slytherin approved that back in sixth year."

"For all they couldn't stand Ron or his family, they still had to make note of the racial correctness of his dating choices," she says. "How utterly twisted. It's like a virus that rots your brain and makes it think twisty. I know, because I catch myself thinking that stuff too after I've been looking at too much of the garbage from the Thicknesse Ministry. Excuse me, the reign of Voldemort. They're so stuck on pretending everything was normal for the last year when we perfectly well know it was no such thing." She remembers their encounter in the hospital wing, and asks, "So it was funny I hadn't run into her before, Lavender I mean."

"She has her appointments down in the Dai Llewelyn ward, for the werewolf bites, you know. And then she sees Derwent for the spell damage and some of the rehabilitation. Some of it's just like Muggle physiotherapy—to make sure the scar tissue doesn't bind too much—and then there's the nightmares, same as the rest of us." Neville sighs, and looks at her. "And speaking of nightmares, there's Marietta."

She doesn't need to ask which one. There's only one Marietta. "Yes."

"That was some jinx you put on the DA membership list. She told me the curse-breaker only managed to get rid of it this spring, after two years trying."

She says, "Bill Weasley. And I was corrected on that point. It wasn't a jinx but a curse. I took the fail-safes out of a standard cursed contract." He's looking at her steadily. "Bill had a chat with me after, you know. Scholarly notes on rare Egyptian curses, just for information. Apparently I reinvented a technique he'd seen before, where you need the original contract intact to be able to break the curse. A really nasty sorcerer would have burned the list after making everyone sign it. Then the curse would have been unbreakable." She says, "Lucky I didn't know that part at the time."

He says softly, "You would have done that."

She says, "Yes. In wartime, yes. When my friends' lives were at stake, yes. And probably worse."

He says, "Marietta is in bad shape. Worse than some of us who were under Cruciatus. You saw her." He pauses to let it sink in. "Damaged. She's damaged. Not as bad as my parents, but she'll never be the same again."

She shudders. She did that. She doesn't have to stress that point, because just now she was being cold-blooded and full of detail on how technically interesting that curse was, and how she could have done far worse—left Marietta marked for the rest of her life—and _would_ have done it if she'd known she could.

Neville says, "That's what Muggle-born is, you know. That's why people like Draco are scared to death of you. You hit every problem with maximum firepower. Including doing your school work, which is why you had the poor git running scared all these years, especially after you sorted Umbridge."

"I really don't care what Draco thinks of me," she retorts, "and I don't know why you're bringing him up, or talking about what Muggle-born is." She's getting angry now, remembering how Neville has a place here and she doesn't, how she's playing games with the time-turner and living at Hogwarts with all sorts of unspecified unpaid duties because she's in hock to the bloody goblins.

She says, "Umbridge was going to torture us, and she had real power. I couldn't think of a solution to her that felt out-of-scale. And Marietta was stupid enough to turn us in. Though there are days I can't help blaming spineless Cho for bringing her along. You don't just casually invite your girl friend along to a secret society because you'd like _company._" She's remembering all over again how scared she was at the time, and how that made her determined to punish anyone who endangered them. "I guess I didn't admit that's what we were. A secret society. It didn't take much for you and Ginny and Luna to turn the DA into an underground resistance movement. It already was."

Neville nods.

"And then I suppose I could blame Harry because he _fancied _Cho and wasn't going to question any idiotic thing she did, even though I had a bad feeling about it at the time," she says. "And because I didn't open my mouth, and I built that bear-trap of a contract, Marietta's damaged now."

"I always thought it was a good thing you were on our side," he says, and unexpectedly he reminds her of the incident at the end of first year, with the body-bind curse she cast on him when he tried to stop them going out to check on the Philosopher's Stone. Neville still remembers this, and bitterly. What stings, after all these years, is that she apologized to him, and then cast the curse. Malfoy had hexed or cursed him innumerable times, but always in a spirit of malice and never with anything like an apology, and somehow that hurt far less.

He tells her how he lay on the floor for hours, growing colder and unable to shiver, his eyes wide open and drying in the chilly air, thinking about how betrayed he felt, and then abandoning that line of thought lest it drive him mad. It was Percy Weasley who found him, in the wee hours of the morning and released him from the curse, and he remembers that he burst into tears from gratitude and was unable to talk, only to sob incoherently as Percy made wordless reassuring noises and stroked his back and let him nestle into the warm folds of his dressing gown.

It's the sole incident of physical affection he remembers from his first year at Hogwarts. He remembers envying Percy for having a mother and father who loved him, and then deciding that it was better to be grateful that Percy was willing to share what he had learned.

It wasn't fun, and it gave him more than enough information about her ruthlessness. What she did to Umbridge, an enemy, came as no surprise after what she did to him, a friend.

She's struck with shame, not at having done that—for at the time she saw no way around it—but for not thinking much about it afterward, when plainly it's haunted Neville for years. And she knows it won't do any earthly good to apologize now—after all, he read her apology at the time as the betrayer's kiss.

Nonetheless, "Neville, I'm sorry. I know it doesn't mean anything…" and her voice trails off because she doesn't want him to know just how dreadful she feels.

He looks and her and nods. Then he continues: to be fair, he's grateful for all the times she was his fierce defender, but he's never forgotten who she was or of what she was capable. Ever since Harry told him the tale of Tom Riddle, he's been thinking about Dark Lords, how they're almost always ambitious outsiders, even if they recruit their courts among the insiders with no moral sense.

All in all, as he thinks about it, he's amazed that he was ever intimidated by Draco.

She looks at him challengingly. "I'm not sure why you're talking about_ Malfoy._"

"He said something the other day that I couldn't believe. About Madam Rosmerta. He said he didn't understand why she hated him, because it had _only_ been Imperius. And she didn't understand that he had to get that job done, and Imperius is how you do that. As if it were a tool, just another tool in the box."

She remembers what Derwent said about the Unforgivable Curses. Blunt tools. Stupid people, vicious people love blunt tools. So do desperate people. And this _creature_ he's invited to join them in studying for the NEWTs…

"And he was never really very good at the Unforgivables. Which still bothers him, and he actually told me he had to _cheat_ to cast Cruciatus."

Her horrified fascination makes her lose the thread of her agenda for the fight. "Why is he telling you this stuff?"

"He thinks I already know it all," Neville says. "He knows you're doing the war crimes database, and he assumes you tell me everything, so he's already standing there with nothing to hide."

"I shouldn't ask this… but how do you cheat on Cruciatus?"

"You're supposed to be channeling hatred. The wish for another's pain. He used fear. It was all he had, and they're not so far apart."

***

Only it turns out that talking about Draco is a pretext, or a preamble, for Neville's real worry, which is what's happening with his Hufflepuff kids, the little gang from the greenhouse. Yes, they're doing well, they love planting, they dig in the dirt like the little badgers on their House escutcheon, they're promising herbologists, all of them, especially little Wilhelmina. But he's noticed them eyeing Draco. Every morning the Aurors take Draco on a long walk around the Hogwarts grounds, his daily mandated exercise—prisoner that he really is—and the route takes them by the greenhouses. More than once, Neville has seen his students looking out the window as the Aurors and their charge pass by, and once he heard Wilhelmina say, "Yeah, that's Malfoy," and laugh, and then someone else said something he didn't hear, and she said, "But Harry Potter did Crucio, and he's got the Order of Merlin."

Neville is asking her, in confidence, if that's true. It's hard for him to believe, really, given all he knows of Harry, and what they both went through in the Battle of the Department of Mysteries—during which they both got a taste of that curse, Neville from his parents' torturer. "It's a rumor, right?" he says. "Someone's spreading this story to make Harry look bad."

Hermione bites her lower lip, and Neville's eyes widen. No, she may as well spill it, because he already guesses. That she didn't say no flat out already tells him.

"It's a rumor," she says, "but as it happens, it's true."

Neville shakes his head.

"McGonagall was there, and Luna, I think," she says. "It was in Ravenclaw Tower. He cast it on Amycus Carrow. Carrow spit on McGonagall and Harry hit him with Crucio, and then McGonagall called him gallant."

"_McGonagall called him gallant."_ Neville looks as if he's going to be sick. He touches the long, ugly scar on his cheekbone, the one from the Carrows' knives, the one that looks like the mark from some primitive adulthood rite. "Hermione, please, that can't be right."

She shakes her head, unnerved both by his reaction and by her own horror, that she's feeling for the first time. She's been through that particular Pensieve memory three or four times, and she perfectly well knows that Harry cast Cruciatus, because she catalogued that one after she tripped over the vial with Harry's memory, via Tom Riddle, of Draco doing the same thing. Only, to be fair, Draco was under far more duress than Harry, certainly under threat of torture himself, and probably his mother and father as well. She doesn't have a complete picture, but she does know that Riddle compelled each of the Malfoys, parents and child, by using the other two as hostages.

"Neville, I saw it in the Pensieve. I've been through it multiple times. I wish it weren't true, but it is. And Harry doesn't say a word about it, not that I can say I've really talked to him much lately…" They were all out at the pub, but no, Harry wasn't talking about it. He and Ron and Ginny were swapping stories they'd heard at the Auror office, funny stories if you had that sense of humor, but none of them were talking about the war.

Neville puts his face in his hands and for a moment Hermione is afraid he's going to be sick. Then she sees his shoulders shaking, hears his breathing turn hoarse and choppy, and the light catches on something, a brief shining glint falling into the darkness between his hands and the floor. Neville is crying, but it sounds more as if he's choking on blood. She touches his shoulder, not sure if that's the thing to do, and the silent choking turns into hoarse, rasping sobs. He shudders, as if to throw off her hand, and curls in on himself.

Difficult as it is to sit still, she does so. She sits still and waits, just as she did with Madam Rosmerta. Not that she has any words for Neville, because she scarcely has them for herself. What do you say? "It's true, the hero in whose name you resisted everything did something unspeakable, and it wasn't even necessary." Derwent, who's as much a professional interrogator as she is a Healer, has said in so many words that torture is never necessary. She would know, too, wouldn't she? She lived through the era of the Crouch trials, when the Aurors were empowered to use Unforgivable Curses with impunity. And no, Neville isn't forgiving at all on the question of Cruciatus, not on his parents' account and certainly not on his own. He wears the scars of the Carrows' detentions to this day. Hermione knows perfectly well that those are reparable, and Neville has chosen to keep them.

Finally he sits up, face puffy and eyes red-rimmed and wet, and says to her nearly exactly what Rosmerta said, "You're still here."

She says, "Of course I'm still here." He looks at her.

"You never told me."

"I never thought to tell you." No, that's not quite right. She doesn't even want to think about it herself. Unforgivable Curses, but they're forgiven if the right person does them. And Harry has been more careless and arrogant and callous than Neville even suspects, because she's one of the few who now knows for sure what happened in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom in sixth year, that Harry nearly eviscerated Draco with a curse whose effects he didn't know, a curse that has spread like wildfire.

Neville is looking at her with a look that's as cold and furious as anything she's ever seen on his face, that goes beyond Stone God into implacable fury, capital-F Fury, wrath of the gods. "You cover for him, Hermione. You lie for him. You lied to me and you lied to everyone else, too. What else are you not telling me? What did _you_ do in the war that you're not admitting to? It must be horrific because what you admit to with a smile is bad enough."

She's backed up against the wall. She's never seen Neville this angry before. This is _not_ going as planned, not at all.

"Neville…" What has she told him and what hasn't she? She doesn't even know. Acts of war, all of it, or clever bits, and she's gotten so inured, if not through her own experience than by endlessly cycling through other people's horrors.

Very slowly, enunciating as if trying to make himself understood to a foreigner or a halfwit, he says, "The Unforgivables, Hermione. Which of them have you cast?"

She has to think. She doesn't know. She honestly doesn't know. She's been in too many people's heads. Harry and Draco both cast Imperius, and Cruciatus. No, she hasn't. She disfigured Marietta and threw Umbridge to the centaurs and blackmailed Rita—that's all. None of it Unforgivable in the technical sense. In the narrow, technical, absurd sense of "Unforgivable" in this world.

"None," she says.

"You hesitated."

"Neville, I'm all day in Pensieve memories. I've been—I've been with—Harry and Ron and for heaven's sake, Severus Snape and Lucius Malfoy, and Draco, and …" her voice trails off. "I can't remember what I did, me, Hermione Granger, unless I _think_ about it."

He looks at her, his features settling into Stone God.

She's furiously angry, very suddenly, and she stands up so fast that it makes her dizzy. She doesn't notice the draperies on the window catching fire. "All right, Neville, we're going to Professor Slughorn _now,_ and he's going to give me Veritaserum, and you're going to ask those questions again. Precisely. What Unforgivable Curses did I, Hermione Granger, cast on persons innocent or otherwise in the entire duration of my life." The work table wrenches itself apart and falls to the floor in a clatter of oak beams and dislodged books. "Or he can Pensieve me, and you can look at it. Neville, I can't stand this."

He says, "You joked about being Lord Voldemort's baby sister, and you're right. You are the best candidate for the next Dark Lord."

She opens her mouth to say something and nothing will come out. Nothing. A sheet of water falls cascading out of nowhere, and the floor starts to rock. She's dizzy, watching it all as if she were floating somewhere up near the ceiling, as the rest of the furniture starts to tear itself apart—the couch and the bookcases and the low table on which she wrote out the NEWTs schedules.

If there were anything on her stomach, she'd be vomiting it up just now.

"Harry lied. You lied. I bloody sacrificed myself, and other people too, for a bloody liar." Twice in the same sentence, _bloody,_ and Neville doesn't use bad language.

"We are going to Professor Slughorn. Or Healer Derwent. Pick whichever you like," she says. "I'm not going to walk out of here with you believing I'm going to be wreaking havoc on the population. I am not Voldemort or anybody like him. The bastard almost killed me, too, or don't you remember? I did what I had to do, Neville. It was _wartime._ Nobody has ever backed _me_ up and you know it. You weren't there when Narcissa bloody Malfoy was telling Bellatrix to take me away for a nice round of Crucio because I was the Mudblood she'd seen in the papers."

She turns to him and says, "Veritaserum. Maximum dose. And you can ask me anything else while I'm under, all right? _Anything at all._"

She stalks to the door, and stands waiting. Neville stares at her, as the curtains burn behind him and water pours down; they're up to their ankles in the flood by now, and the front room is a shambles. She's taking deep breaths, trying to calm herself before something else takes shape out of her rage and helplessness and desolation.

He takes out his wand. For a brief moment she's certain he's going to point it at her heart—and then he does _Reparo_ on the ruined furniture, _Finite Incantatem_ on the cascade of water and the burning curtains.

He says, "Derwent. I don't trust Slughorn. He's not going to be unbiased with either of us, and whatever your answer is, I don't want him knowing."

***

**Author's note:** For an alternate version of the Body-Bind incident, POV Neville, see NevemTeve's short fiction _Finite Incantatem (en)_ on fanfiction (dot) net. See my favorites for a link.


	28. Chapter 28

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

It's the first meeting of the Committee on the Status of Sentient Magical Beings, and Hermione is displeased to notice that a substantial proportion of the membership is pureblood functionaries like the ones on the War Crimes Commission. They're pleased with themselves, that lot, the ones who handed Greyback his constituency on a silver platter, with the Umbridge legislation making it impossible for werewolves to find any kind of employment.

Speaking of which, the agenda does not in fact include werewolves, which are classified as Dark Creatures, along with Dementors, the other case that has been bothering her. It seems a timely enough occasion to raise the question of just whom the Dementors obey, because they seem to have returned to Azkaban without an invitation. Kingsley Shacklebolt was quite clear that he had planned for a prison system that did not use the threat of soul-eating monsters. The Dementors had a completely different notion of the matter.

For that matter, how do Dementors communicate their intentions? She's never known them to speak, though from the records she does know that there are those in the Ministry who command them.

She asked Kingsley about it, and he didn't answer her… or, now that she thinks about it, maybe he _couldn't._ There seem to be secrets on both sides, and her impression now is that the Minister for Magic is bound by something like Fidelius. She asked, and everything about the Minister's manner communicated to her that he was going to tell her… and then nothing came out of his mouth.

The Committee is not going to discuss Dementors, or the commanding thereof, although she remembers the ones that Umbridge dispatched to Little Whinging to attack Harry… and Harry's Muggle cousin. There's a thought. The Dementor overpopulation has some nasty possiblities. They're loose in the countryside; they haven't shown up in Hogsmeade again, but that's only a matter of time. She's not sure if the defenses of Hogwarts are proof against them; she remembers that Dumbledore forbade them the premises, but exactly how that was enforced she's not clear.

That leads to a thought at least as disturbing, which is her new civic duty as a teacher of the Patronus Charm. She and Neville, the ex-Defense Association members quartered at Hogwarts, just had their second session with the Hogsmeade residents. They'll be doing refresher trainings from time to time, the equivalent of drilling the militia, and the Ministry will be dispatching them to other localities to teach. Harry, Ron and Ginny, as trainee Aurors, are similarly occupied; Luna and Dean have been doing the same thing in Ottery St. Catchpole and Godric's Hollow. Invisibly, without anyone making any particular note of it, the Defense Association has been recruited into the post-war civil defense effort, as specialists in the teaching of the Patronus Charm. Harry is the official golden boy, but really (as Harry himself points out) it's the legacy of Remus Lupin, because it was Remus who taught Harry, and Harry who repeated the lessons to the Defense Association.

Was it the Patronus Charm in particular that Umbridge preferred they not learn? She's thinking about that now; it's the infallible defense against the Ministry's chief weapon of terror against the population. That puts the work of the Defense Association in a whole new light. Maybe Umbridge had a case; they really are weakening the position of the Ministry, if you include terror as a legitimate tool of statecraft.

Every time they teach the Patronus Charm, she is silently thankful to Remus Lupin for being an excellent teacher to Harry. And then she thinks about the reputation of that piece of magic: difficult, obscure, hard to master, rare. Certainly that's not borne out by her experience in the Defense Association, nor by her and Neville's experience teaching civilians, some of them not even qualified witches and wizards. Rather disturbing, the further she follows the line of reasoning: they were lied to.

Then there's the next question: if the wizarding world succeeds in defending itself against the rogue Dementors, will the creatures turn to the Muggle world for prey? The werewolves appear to be doing that. So far, it's only killings (how callous she's become, that she can say _only_ _killings_), which is to say that they haven't attempted to make more of themselves. The day that happens, the day that mixed wizard-and-Muggle werewolf packs are roaming the English countryside…

She corrects herself. Not only the countryside, but the cities. The last full moon saw attacks in London and Manchester.

The committee shuffles its collective feet and designates her as its researcher, given her well-known penchant for fact-finding. (She sees more than a trace of a smirk on the face of the chair-witch as she says this.) She's being given full access to libraries at Hogwarts and the Ministry, including some of the holdings in the Department of Mysteries. Once they have a solid grounding in the full historical context, they can begin to move forward. She's feeling hopeful for the first time in years that something might actually change. The scope of her research is broad: house-elf legislation since Roman times, reservation policies for centaurs and merpeople, diplomatic relations with the Goblins. She smiles bitterly at that last; interesting choice, indeed, to have a bond-slave of Gringotts researching Goblin relations. She already knows from the soporific lectures of Binns that it isn't a pretty picture.

Goblins have their own magic, wandless by necessity… since wizards have denied them wands. She remembers Griphook's sudden reverse on the question of the sword, and now wonders if their magic includes Legilimency. Did Griphook know that Ron had been contemplating cheating them out of the sword?

Not a pretty thought. None of this is pretty.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – some time in October)**

So if Neville is right—and he may be right—what to do about Marietta? I already gave Derwent, and by extension Bill Weasley, everything needed to break the curse, and it's broken. And yes, I know the background now, that Marietta feared for her mother, who was at the mercy of Umbridge in the Ministry... well, that's the same excuse that our little friend Draco had for attempting to kill Dumbledore, and nearly carrying off Ron and Katie at the same time.

I can't think about Draco without getting utterly furious, because he's ruined things with Neville… or at least it was his name that came up, right before the debacle. I suppose it's pointless to worry about what sort of signals of romantic interest Neville might have been sending me, subtly or otherwise, because that's over. If he thinks I'm the next Voldemort, there's no question of anything between us—even as friends.

What does he want me to do? Sackcloth and ashes? Write Marietta a letter of apology accusing myself of war crimes? Because I know just how happily that would be greeted by certain elements. They'd be happy to take me at my word and burn me at the stake in place of Lucius Malfoy, who did far worse.

Yes, he's right: the curse is lifted, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't leave invisible marks on Marietta. After all, I let it stand for two years, and except that Derwent called my attention to it, and Dumbledore happened to have tucked the cursed contract into one of the Dark Arts books for the Horcrux hunt, it would have stood forever. And Dumbledore wasn't particularly fussed about it, was he? What's the sanity of one insignificant teenaged girl when you have a cosmic chessboard to contemplate?

I can count my own scars, and the worst are the ones that don't show. There's a minute silver line on my neck, where Bellatrix scratched me with her knife. I didn't notice it at the time, not that I was conscious for the last bit. Fleur told me afterward that Ron was near hysterical at the blood, though trying to carry on for my sake. Cleaned and stanched, it was scarcely deeper than a paper cut; of course if she had cut deeper, it would have been straight into the carotid artery. But that didn't happen. The real damage is on the inside of my head, where the nightmares play out at the slightest provocation.

What I committed against Marietta was an act of war, and as I look back, I cannot see how I could have done it differently, except to object to Cho bringing her. I spoke truth to Neville: I _knew_ that was a bad idea, and I knew that Harry was swayed by his fancy for Cho. Swayed is the right word too: from the outside I could see that he was near dizzy in her presence—as I have been lately, in Neville's presence.

It's all physical, of course, and it was so much easier for me to see Harry's folly than my own. Harry is a hothead, easily swayed by passions of all kinds, for both good and ill. My picture of myself—or my friends' caricature of me, which is nearly the same thing—is that I don't _do_ lust, or any of the irrational emotions.

So among other things, I don't admit that at last week's flying lesson with Malfoy, I stared at him and thought about how I knew more about him than he probably knew about himself. When the wind caught his robes as he was demonstrating the screaming dive that's the heart of the Wronski Feint, he inadvertently showed me rather more leg than is customary in this world, and to my surprise I actually felt a little shiver of arousal…

…even though I saw far less skin than I'd see had he been dressed, say, for running or swimming in _my _world, but that's beside the point. I've assimilated their archaic standards, which means that I can understand the Victorian frisson at the sight of an ankle.

And speaking of matters of lust…

I've kept enough from Derwent, not least the Polyjuice games, that somehow started as a work-related experiment, and have turned into something else entirely. Something that Emily, by way of Neville, has told me really is indecent, with her suggestion that Horace Slughorn ran in the Hogwarts _fast crowd_ in his day, and that she'll give Neville the full details when he's _older._

Methinks Emily was in the fast crowd herself; how else would she know what sort of mischief her schoolmate got up to?

The one thing that jumps out at me in Slughorn's memory, the one from Dumbledore's archives, is that he had a serious crush on young Tom Riddle, and that Tom played that for all it was worth. Not that I think Slughorn is the sort of teacher who would act on such feelings… which made Tom's hold on him all the more powerful. Oh yes, Tom is quite handsome—with his dark hair and eyes and his pale, luminous skin—in all those memories from the cursed diary and poor Ginny's fragmentary recollection of her time in the Chamber of Secrets and then Slughorn's recollection of Tom's seductive, sidelong attempt to learn the art and science of the Horcrux. Yes, Horace Slughorn told Tom what he ought not to have told.

It is not for me to replicate his mistake.

And Neville is as angry and bitter as Ginny, in his own way, except that she is fire and he is ice, or near enough, when angry. Yes, he's been given a pat on the head by the Powers That Be, and a little medal by way of tip for giving himself up to torture and then risking death, and then he's inherited a disaster to clean up. He and Professor Sprout, neither of them trained professionals, not in the terms of my world, are trying to run a rehabilitation center for child soldiers and victims of torture. I know that he has his own nightmares, as I have mine, and that his war was lonely and terrifying, and that, like me, he came right to the brink of death and miraculously lived to tell the tale.

Let me spell that out plainly: Neville Longbottom, orphaned at age two, is trying to minister to other orphans without ever having thought about his own losses. Of course, Neville's answer would be that he doesn't need to do that, and doesn't have the luxury of time, given the pressing need of these others.

But it's warped him into something quite a bit harder-edged than the sweet, stubborn boy I remember. There's something of the fanatic in him… well, he was given a taste of the Time of the Burning, wasn't he? That time of deadly zealotry made the Blacks and the Malfoys what they are now, and pulled closed the gates to the larger world. Why should I expect that fire would have left Neville untouched?

Neville's bloody righteousness… as if he were my judge. As if he had any right. Yes, his heart is pure, but wasn't it Robespierre they called the Incorruptible?

No, I don't know what went on at Hogwarts in the last year. If he thinks he has the right to demand this… well, some of those secrets are not mine to give away, and he ought to know better, since the two of us have been keeping Draco's secret all this time, at McGonagall's orders. But if he is going to demand a _full accounting,_ then it ought to be symmetric.

***

Far past midnight, now, and I am so tired that I cannot remember whom it is I will be impersonating tomorrow, in which world I will be turning up to work as if I'm in the real world, than which there is no other. The answer, of course, is _both in turn._

We're all too young to be doing what we're doing.

I just turned nineteen, and I'm the archivist for the war crimes tribunal. Scratch that. I am the current agent of technology transfer from the Muggle world to the wizarding one. I am the Manhattan Project, the Enigma, the radar, all rolled into one. I'm a middling-fair hacker in the other world, and Oppenheimer and General Groves in this one, on far less budget than they commanded.

Percy Weasley, some years from twenty-five, is high commissioner for refugee affairs, without the power or the budget that would make that job possible, and he's doing that work while carrying the stigma of traitor.

Lavender Brown, who was best known for her giggle and her décolletage, spent her summer in painful rehabilitation from her war wounds. In spite of our rivalry for Ron, I hope it is not her face that took the worst of it.

Our whole secret society—well, except for the racially incorrect ones—has been taken up into Auror training, and all of us, Auror trainees and civilians alike, are running the civil defense. None of us have attained our twentieth year.

And this in a world where the mandarins who run it all live into the middle of their second century, like the celebrated Madam Marchbanks.

I think that the Ministry is worried about a military coup, and _we_ are the military, so far as the wizarding world has one. And if I were the aspiring Dark Lord (or would I be the Dark Lady?) as Neville seems to think I am, I would betake myself to the Burrow and bring Harry J. Potter out of his retirement to cozy private life, and prevail upon him to make use of his messiah status for something useful and mutually profitable, such as the conquest of the wizarding world and the worlds beyond.

No, I don't have intentions of world conquest this generation. That's a recipe for overwork, and I already have three jobs, thank you. Besides, you'd have to be crazy—really crazy, Voldemort crazy, to take on a job like that. As for _running_ wizarding Britain once you'd conquered it, let alone the realms beyond… well, it's chaos itself and only seems to organize itself to get up to trouble.

The idiots on the sentient beings committee can't take a step without a pile of research—unless that's a diversionary tactic, which might be the case but I'll hold off being cynical just yet, because no research is ever wasted—and on the other hand, rumor has it (by way of the Auror office) that they're busy dismantling Malfoy Manor. Carting off all the movables, at least, even though the indictments aren't even in draft yet. I almost feel sorry for Lucius Malfoy, because they have more or less declared him guilty without trial. Well, that's _almost_ sorry_._ He did have it in for me, after all—that whole business in second year was pointed at me, me and all the other Muggle-borns, and certainly I was the one he named when he was verbally cuffing Draco for slacking off on school work. Except when I look through the Pensieve memory of my detention at the Manor, the man looks like a ghost, gaunt and years older than his mere forty-five years. If only for selfish reasons, he had ample reason to regret signing on with the Dark Lord by the end.

Oh yes, and there's a question as to whether Percy Weasley is going to be the second token Ministry defendant, now that Pius Thicknesse is dead. He knows it, too. I saw him in the hallway at the Ministry the other day and he looked haggard—and it didn't help that he was dealing with a desperate refugee: one of our displaced persons, a Muggle-born whose family had been killed during the Thicknesse Ministry, and who had no job or prospects or place to go back to in either world. Percy told him that he would take the case all the way up to the Ministerial level, because things had gone on in this way for far too long.

When the man finally left, Percy slumped against the wall, exhausted, and I saw him push up his spectacles and cover his eyes and weep silently. I don't know how much he's sleeping.

I kept back until he recovered himself, and then I walked up to him and invited him to lunch. On the other side of the border, because I am taking Neville's warning seriously, and I don't have a tab at the Leaky Cauldron. There's a place we might go, not far from King's Cross, but well out of the way of even the border-crossing wizarding crowd.

I owe Percy, not least for his kindness at the picnic and for telling me the things that my teachers didn't bother to tell. I wish _he'd_ taught History of Magic; then at least the rest of them might have stayed awake long enough to know what we were going to be facing when we won the war.

***

At lunch with Percy on her own ground, she notices how tired he looks, though he eats with a good appetite. He tells her that his mother has been after him about his work habits, particularly eating at the desk, and she'd be grateful to know that someone was taking him away from that. He can't quite manage it himself, because there's always one more urgent case… like the one that she witnessed.

She realizes that he saw her standing there, knew that she had witnessed him losing his composure.

He smiles at her and says he's heard good things about the work she's doing with Derwent. Very good work, and he's made a point of mentioning her interest in history of wizarding technology where it might do some good.

"The book was quite good," she says. He looks puzzled momentarily, as he pauses with fork in mid-air. "The one on the Floo system and Owl Post," she says. "Harry and Ron and Ginny gave it to me for my birthday."

He nods; he'd forgotten that.

Then he asks her if she sees Ginny. She feels her face burning, thinking about that last time she _saw_ Percy's sister, which was in the loo of the Three Broomsticks… no, she doesn't want to think about that. In fact, she'd rather not think about Ginny at all…

Percy frowns slightly, and says, "She's acting strangely, isn't she?"

Hermione nods at his understatement of the case.

"I'm worried about her. She's not quite right."

"No, none of us are, not since the war."

Percy puts his fork down and shakes his head. "No. Not since her first year at Hogwarts. I wish I'd noticed earlier, but she avoided me whenever I tried to ask her. And she wouldn't talk in front of those louts…" He closes his eyes and takes a breath. "Not to speak ill of the dead, but Fred and George were _no help_."

Hermione nods. "I talked to Harry about it, gave him a card for Healer Derwent in St. Mungo's Spell Damage. The problem is that everyone thinks of the closed ward when you say St. Mungo's, so of course she doesn't want to go." _And she doesn't think it's a problem, and no one around her thinks it's a problem._ "And I'm in disgrace with your family, so my word doesn't count for much. You're right, too. They _don't_ forgive."

Percy says, "Dean and Luna came to talk to me about it. They thought I might be able to do something, you know, as her brother. It's awkward for Dean, of course…" _Awkward_ is rather an understatement; here's Ginny's old boyfriend, toward whom Harry has less than friendly feelings, living in the same house. She still remembers those deadly glances Harry shot at Dean when he thought no one was looking, back in sixth year. "She and Luna are friends from the war, of course, but Luna says she can't make any headway. And Neville had no luck, either." She can't help it; she winces at the name.

Percy looks at her, his face sharp with worry. Oh, she'd forgotten, Percy is the Weasley who actually notices things…

"So Neville came to talk to her." It's a neutral conversation, and really she's talking about Neville who is Ginny's friend and comrade from the war, not Neville whom she thought she might fancy. Different people. Two different people, who just happen to share a name.

Percy nods. "She brushed him off." He takes a sip from his pint of ale, and puts it down. "I don't know what she said to him, but he didn't look good when he left." Under Hermione's steady gaze, Percy hesitates, then says, "I haven't seen him look so bad since the Hogwarts memorial service." That's saying something, given that Neville had wept openly when they read the names of the dead, starting with Remus Lupin.

"So Luna and Neville both talked to Ginny, and it did no good." She doesn't want to say what occurs to her next, _so what do you think I can manage?_

Percy nods. "I think we need to talk to Harry again. As a committee. I looked up the stuff she's dosing herself with now. Calming draughts, and sometimes she's spiking them with Firewhiskey. The interactions aren't good. If she's not careful, she could kill herself."

Abruptly Hermione remembers what Neville told her about Draco's roundabout suicide attempt. "She isn't doing Dreamless Sleep, is she?"

He understands perfectly; after all, this is Percy with the prodigious count of NEWTs, including an 'O' in Potions. "No, the Healers won't prescribe it any more, and Mum cleared out all the household stocks just in case. I go to the Diagon Alley apothecary when I need mine, and buy it in a single dose so there won't be any left over."

"It sounds as if everyone's quite clear that there's a problem…"

"Well, you know how Mum is. She'll do the necessary but never in a thousand years admit there's anything afoot."

"Until Ginny kills herself or somebody else." She remembers that conversation in the pub about Malfoy, and says, "She's talking a pretty violent game just now."

Percy nods. "I was up early and heard her talking to Andromeda. It wasn't pretty, what she was saying." He drops his voice. "I know that everyone's saying, 'So you want to kill Lucius Malfoy—well, queue up and keep orderly.' But it's not a joke in her case."

Hermione is grateful that they're in a Muggle establishment where uttering the name Lucius Malfoy won't automatically call attention to them, but she isn't sure about the word "kill," so under the table she pulls out her wand and, carefully out of sight, casts a discreet _Muffliato._ Percy looks at her as if he's about to say something, and then subsides into silence as he takes a long sip of his ale.

"Nobody's watching us," she says. "I'm of age, remember."

"They're talking about an improved Trace, you know. Since the war."

Hermione doesn't like the sounds of this. "I thought that was only for underage magic."

"Well, yes, but my _sources_ are apparently keeping an eye on what you're doing, and they see some possibilities for the general population. And they _really_ like the blood status paperwork."

She isn't sure what to do with this information, so she takes a gulp of ale while she considers it.

"That isn't firewhiskey, but it will go to your head if you bolt it like that," Percy says primly.

"Maybe I ought to have some firewhiskey, then. That thought would seem to justify it."

"I don't touch the stuff," Percy says, rather stiffly. He stares into his plate for a moment. "Because if I touched it, I wouldn't stop." He frowns, and adds, "And I have to be coherent to sort this mess, and so do you."

She says, "I suppose it's a good thing that we didn't out your good deeds in the late war. Your _sources_ sound like an interesting lot."

Percy smiles, a thin bitter smile that makes him look a battle-weary fifty. "Oh, so they are, so they are. The worst of it is that every day I have to think that my father was more than right about the Ministry, and never have the satisfaction of telling him so." He runs one hand through his thatch of red hair, and in the dull pewter light of a London October, Hermione sees the glitter of silver among the carroty red.

They eat the rest of the meal in silence, and at the close, Hermione pays the tab, after which they take out their agendas and make another lunch date. The ongoing seminar, she would think, in contemporary problems of Muggle-magical technology transfer. Percy is rather a charming luncheon companion. He really ought to be lecturing History of Magic at Hogwarts, but that's not really a possibility until they've sorted the history that's being made just now—and which, if she thinks about it, seems to bid fair to repeat its Muggle original.

And then there's the question of bringing the _committee _to bear on Harry… which she'll put off until she's settled things with Neville.

***

She takes the Ministry Floo to St. Mungo's, and steps out of the great hearth to meet the silver-ringletted visage of Dilys Derwent, who is standing in her portrait consulting a medieval bestiary, which she must have borrowed from one of the portraits at Hogwarts. "Manticore bites," she is muttering to herself. "Not a lot of room for differential diagnosis there."

Hermione gives the portrait a polite nod. Even across two and a half centuries, the resemblance to Boudicca Derwent is striking: the round face in particular, and the silver in the hair, although Dilys' locks have gone entirely silver, the color of moonlight in black water, and Boudicca's cropped hair more closely resembles a field going to frost in the autumn, with the original dark brown still visible if only in hints.

She glances around the reception area and then gets in the lift. Neville is probably coming directly from the closed ward, so he's already upstairs in the Spell Damage department. She's not sure what Derwent will make of the request. The lift is moving far more slowly than usual… or she's more impatient. No, she really wants to get this over. She's not sure if the Pensieve or the Veritaserum would be the best to settle the question. She doesn't want to think about what Neville could ask her under the Veritaserum, since she was fool enough to lay the agenda wide open. Anything you like, she said. Granted, she said it in anger—or was it desperation—nonetheless she was quite serious, and he knew it.

Indeed, he's waiting for her just outside Derwent's office, sitting in the least comfortable chair and leafing through an ancient copy of _Witch Weekly._ Odd that the reading material they put out in this place is uniformly frivolous; you could be sitting there waiting to find out if your father is going to survive some kind of exotic curse, and all you have to read is fluff about the most eligible wizards in Britain, or Celestina Warbeck's costume designer.

He looks too big for that chair—well, that's been her impression of him since the war. He's too big for everything that was built to the scale of ordinary mortals. He's reading, or pretending to read, with the limp greasy leaves of the magazine spread out across his lap, and every so often he's been scratching or rubbing his head, as a result of which his hair is mussed and tangled. Nominally, it's tied back, but those absent fingers have pulled great loops of it out of the clasp.

She sees the shadows that the loose hairs cast on his forehead and nose, the shadows of his eyelashes… yes, if the pounding of her heart didn't tell her, then this absurd sharpness and profusion of detail would tell her that she's awash in adrenalin.

He looks up, and his eyes are dark and unreadable, the expression on his face pure Stone God… except for that little tremor about the mouth—a very rosy, soft, surprisingly mobile mouth. Or maybe it's only soft by contrast with the adamantine lines of the rest of the face.

"You're early," he says. She nods. She doesn't like to be late, and she managed this timely arrival without any help from the time-turner, which is quite an accomplishment.

She sits down across from him. They're not there together, exactly. He hesitates for a moment, looks at the magazine as if he were going to keep up his pretense of reading, then he closes it and places it on the low table where the other, similarly out-of-date reading material fans out across the battered surface. She wishes she had a book, but this time she doesn't have any with her. They look at each other.

"I've changed my mind about the conditions," she says. "If I'm going to answer questions _completely truthfully,_ then you should be willing to do the same."

He nods. "That's only fair."

"And just for the record, about Marietta, I didn't _have_ the contract until this last year anyway. They impounded it, remember, and then Dumbledore filed it away in one of the books I used for the Horcrux hunt." There's a whole lot more she could tell him about Dumbledore, of course, but that's Harry's story to tell.

Derwent steps out to greet her, and raises an eyebrow when Neville stands up as well. Hermione forestalls the question. "I think you know Neville Longbottom. He's with me… to have some questions answered." Derwent nods, and sees them into the office.

Hermione explains what she offered Neville, and what foolish thing she said besides, and Neville chimes in that he's making a reciprocal offer.

Derwent looks at her. "Have you ever been questioned under Veritaserum?" Hermione shakes her head. She's read about it, but there are aspects of the experience that clearly aren't covered in the literature. Derwent turns to Neville and says, "You realize that this is a rather unorthodox request. I think I would like to know a little more about your intentions."

Neville meets Derwent's critical glance, and says, "I want to know the truth about what Hermione did in the war," he says. _And how far she's lying to cover up for Harry, _she knows he means, but he doesn't say that part aloud. He adds, "And you have my full consent."

Derwent considers him in silence for a moment or two, her eyes locked on his in a way that goes beyond _rude_ to _distinctly disquieting._ Neville reminds her of a patient in the dentist's chair trying to relax in spite of the urge to flinch; once or twice his face flushes pink, and then an incandescent blush spreads across his face and neck, and he licks his lips nervously as if he'd like to look away, but he doesn't.

When Derwent breaks eye contact, it's with an exhalation that sounds suspiciously like an exasperated sigh.

She looks at both of them significantly before speaking. "Veritaserum is not a child's toy, nor is an interrogation under its influence a means of settling quarrels between friends." She turns to Hermione, "You should not have offered, and your ignorance only partially excuses that." To Neville she says, "You should not have accepted the offer nor made a counter-offer." And then she adds, "You are both well-informed about Imperius damage, since you've referred patients to us. Questioning under Veritaserum does similar damage, and I'm quite surprised at both of you for not working that out independently."

Hermione feels foolish, and irritated with Neville for his foolishness; she's ashamed of herself for losing her head, and worse, not working out an implication that now seems plain as day. She's supposed to be the sensible one, the _intelligent_ one, and she's behaving no better than she did in sixth year.

On the heels of that shame, she feels a profound sense of relief that grownup good sense and professional ethics have prevailed.

Neville is feeling something similar, she would conjecture, from the way he's staring at the floor. "I'm sorry," he says at length. The tone takes her back to the time he owned up to losing the common-room password, in third year when Sirius Black was at large. _Yes, I'm the duffer who almost got us all killed._

Then he goes on to say that there's no excuse, of course he understands that, but he's worried about how the kids have read Harry's use of the Unforgivables. They know that Harry used Crucio from outrage at what the Carrows had done to his friends, and to the kids at Hogwarts, and they think that their suffering has bought them the right of retaliation. And he's out of his depth, desperately so, and he knows that he can't hold it off much longer, what's going to happen, that it's all going to start over again. He knows the tale of Tom Riddle, and he has at least two or three Tom Riddles among his greenhouse kids, who would have been ordinary children in ordinary times.

And then there's the matter of Sectumsempra, but of course she knows all about that.

And what do you say to a twelve-year-old trying to cast a Patronus, who tells you that all of her happy memories are ruined by what came after? He will stand out in front of the Wizengamot in protest, he will go on public hunger strike, if they try to send those kids to Azkaban, but all the same he knows that there are those who took advantage of the license that the Carrows gave them. He has the list of names. And he'll have her know they're not all in Slytherin House, contrary to the post-war propaganda.

But there's no justice in the wizarding world. He knew that from the time he was a first-year at Hogwarts. He's always known it; if there were justice, would his parents be lying in the closed ward? Really, it's the same place it always was, only descended a little further into hell. The weak go to the wall, in spite of all his efforts not to see his own misery replicated.

And it was too much, just too much to think that _Hermione…_ He doesn't finish the sentence.

Instead, he looks directly at Derwent and tells her that she's right, that his ignorance really is inexcusable, because he knows more than he wants to know about the Healer's craft. Last year, Madam Pomfrey initiated him and most of the DA. He knows how to do aftercare for burns and cuts and the suppurating wounds from hexes that burn from the inside out, and Cruciatus of course, not to mention the damage from ordinary, which is to say Muggle-style, beatings and sexual assault. He prides himself on one thing only, that none of them went mad… at least not right away.

Though there are days, Merlin forgive him for saying so, that he envies his parents. But having been given back his life by a miracle, there's nothing for it but to see the task through, no matter how hopeless it is.

Hermione isn't sure through the whole thing if she should stay or go, and Derwent is so intent on listening to Neville that she gives her no signal. So she seats herself quietly in the corner, hands folded in her lap and ankles demurely crossed, in the posture of the _good child_ that she learned on visits to her grandparents.

Derwent hears him out, and then tells him that even Healers have occasional need of a Healer themselves. She gives him her card. He nods, and says that he will be back, and apologizes for taking up his friend's appointment.

***

And after all the report of wild magic during her dispute with Neville, and the shaking fury she still feels at being accused of being a nascent Dark Lord, and then the cold realization that she _could_ be one if she so decided, what stays with her afterward is one brief exchange.

"Does it occur to you that Dark Lords don't usually keep such friends about them, nor listen to their counsel?"

"What will matter in the end is what I do."

"As long as you bear that in mind, and keep your mind open to those who disagree with you, I think that your risk is much lower than you might fear. Constant vigilance, you know."

***

When she emerges from the appointment, Neville is sitting in the waiting room. He apologizes, not looking at her. It's very awkward, and he is looking thoroughly ashamed of himself. He shouldn't have said that about Dark Lords, really he shouldn't. And he knows that she feels bad about the body-bind, and he won't bring it up again.

And he's not such a fool as all that. He knows it was war.

She says, "Winning a war is about delivering the killing blow. I couldn't afford to lose. They would have killed me, and my parents, and everyone else who mattered to me." It's already too much, she knows, but just to underline she adds, "I'm a hacker. I'm good at ways and means, and I understand _life or death._ But I'm not good at _being good, _I don't think."

Neville looks at her, and she sees that he's still rather too flushed, and she would guess from the scrubbed look of his face that he's doused it in cold water in the loo, more than once, while she was in with Derwent.

And then, with unexpected vividness, she remembers the first time she saw him.

There are details of the experience that she's forgotten, including the color of Trevor's back, and the way that Neville's hair, dark blond then, flopped over his forehead, and the precise shade of pink in his round, tearful face. As well… well, everything that she thought at the time. _He's not so formidable. In fact, I know better than he does, so I should take care of him. I'm glad I read all those books last year. He's rather a duffer, even if he's a real live wizard. I know his grandmother is a witch, because what else would she be? _She'd forgotten that Neville's Gran was the second full-grown witch she had seen, after Minerva McGonagall. _I wonder what kind of animal _she_ turns into. _She hadn't known yet that not every witch of formidable appearance was necessarily an Animaga.

Her first impression of Neville had been wrong, quite wrong, further wrong than she ever could have suspected.

She tells him that in the morning he should contact Percy Weasley. It's about Ginny; Percy has an idea of what they might do. And she's gratified to see him cheer up a bit, because there's another problem to be solved, and this one might even be tractable, if they put their shoulders to the wheel and push.

***


	29. Chapter 29

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

It is in the Underground on the way to Dean's mother's that Hermione realizes that Luna doesn't look out of place in Muggle London at all.

She is sitting across from Dean and Luna, who are swaying gently as the train shoots forward from the station into the darkness (what she still doesn't like to think about), and Luna's eyes drop half-shut in the beatific trance of the long-distance rail traveler. Even in her blue and purple robes, with her silver-buckled shoes poking out and a glimpse of her ankles in violet stockings, she looks as if she quite belonged. No one else is taking particular notice of her, for certain; they all have newspapers or magazines. Dean is looking at his sketchbook, reviewing and marking something on the corner of each page.

The impression persists all the way to the flat. It is a tiny cramped place in an unprosperous corner of London; as soon as she walks in the front door, there is no doubt about who lives there. The walls are covered in pictures. She recognized Dean's work, and Luna's. She can tell them apart, even when they're working in the same media. Luna is experimenting with Muggle drawing technique. Her drawings are razor-sharp naturalist's field notes or impressionistic shimmers of color and light, very like Turner, who is her idol among Muggle artists. Dean specializes in scenes of sport—football and Quidditch—and portraits.

As well, there are photographs of the family: Dean's mother, his stepfather, his two little sisters—skinny little brown girls in pigtails and brightly colored shirts—and the two brothers who are next up in age. Half-sisters and half-brothers, Hermione reminds herself, although the little girls don't seem to be aware of the distinction, as they pile into the front room to greet Dean; their faces brighten when they see Luna, and they run back to their room—to get their drawings, Dean explains.

That explains the pictures that look a bit like Lovegoods but aren't quite. (Hermione is amused to find herself thinking of pictures that are "Lovegoods," but Luna's style is quite distinctive.) If his artistic talent is an inherited gift, it descends by the Muggle side of the family. She remembers his remarks about magic versus imagination, and smiles. Score another point for the Muggles, for the little sisters are quite as talented as their half-brother. The matter of their pictures runs to cats, pop stars, girls in elaborate stage costumes, and (for nature study) the herbs that their mother cultivates in the tiny south-facing window of her kitchen.

The little girls settle onto the couch, one on either side of Luna, to show her their pictures, with only some childish exasperation that she has never heard of the Spice Girls, who are the subject of this week's portfolio. "She has hair a bit like Scary Spice," says one of them, and Hermione laughs to realize it's her they mean.

"This is my friend Hermione," Dean corrects. "And you lot have no manners."

They shush him, because "Luna is looking at _pictures._"

Luna looks at Hermione, and says, "But they're right. Hermione can be a bit scary, sometimes." She doesn't actually wink, but there's something in her expression that implies it.

The showing of the little girls' pictures provides the cover for Dean's mother to have a word with Hermione in the kitchen. She already knows her by name and reputation, by way of Dean, and she knows something of the late war.

And she knows what Hermione is doing for the War Crimes Commission, and that she insisted that the news about Dean's father be given to the family.

"Thank you. It makes such a difference to know what happened to him, that he didn't leave us willingly."

Eighteen years, most of Hermione's own lifetime, Dean's mother has been haunted by the question. Dean hovers in the doorway, keeping an eye on his mother and, when she's not looking at him, looking at her with an expression of worried solicitude. Hermione realizes in a flash that it's _here_ he's been when he's not working on his portfolio or teaching the Patronus Charm. It's not defiance that's making him put off the NEWTs so much as the sheer impossibility of balancing that against his family responsibilities, of the hours spent talking over with his mother the matters of which she cannot speak to her husband or to her daughters or to Dean's younger brothers, who are with their father this afternoon.

She sent them out of the house so they could have this conversation, Hermione realizes. Dean's mother has had her entire world rearranged; a long-ago story of heartbreak, the husband who inexplicably abandoned his wife and small son, has been replaced by another just as harrowing, the brave man who fled to draw off his enemies from the family he had inadvertently involved in his fate.

***

Dean's mother is a remarkably talented cook, _a real kitchen witch,_ Hermione is tempted to remark, who could give Molly Weasley a run for her money. She sets dish after dish on the table, and Hermione is required to take some of everything, because, as her hostess insists, sounding quite a bit like Neville: "You're too thin, and you need feeding up."

She doesn't want to think about Neville just now, given the stab of feeling: the cherished grudge (how dare he call her a nascent Dark Lord) and the leaden conviction that things are irrevocably wrecked between them.

Dean's little sisters are dutifully forking fried plantains into their mouths; Luna is complimenting Dean's mother on the stew, whose dense rich flavor, impossible to tease apart into its components, tells Hermione that it was lovingly simmered for hours.

Dean's mother passes her the serving bowl with the stew and insists that she take another portion, as if she were a long-lost relative come back from shipwreck. No, she's not that; she's only the bearer of bad tidings, and yet treated as a welcome guest.

Well, someone thinks well of her.

***

It's Friday, and she's been at work for twelve hours: four hours of meetings at the bank, then a brief nap on the bed in her old bedroom, and then six hours at the Ministry, all thanks to the time-turner. A paper-airplane memo, rather jauntier than the others, sails into her work space just before noon. It's from Percy, unsigned of course, saying that they're meeting in one of the upstairs rooms at the Leaky Cauldron on the matter discussed earlier, and can she be there for half past noon.

They've decided, as a committee, to arrest Ginny Weasley's swift descent into serious trouble, if not outright madness.

She meets Harry in the lift on the way to the grand foyer. He greets her absently, and they make what she realizes is _small talk._ She didn't think that things would have gone that far, but he's keeping aloof in a disquieting way.

When they step out of the Floo at the Leaky, there's Hannah Abbot waving from the bar, her blonde hair caught up in pigtails and her face pink from exertion; she's just run upstairs from the basement storeroom. "Tom says the room's ready, so you can go right up."

There's the briefest of moments when Harry realizes that they're headed to the same destination.

Percy had called it a meeting, but it's really more in the manner of an ambush.

There's Percy and Dean and Luna and herself, of course, and Neville, who looks at her with a sad and stricken expression. She's not going to think about that, because they're about serious business.

Percy calls them to order. What they all have in common here, all but Harry, is that they've tried to talk to Ginny and failed.

Harry frowns. It's none of their affair.

No, Percy says, it's very much their affair. On Harry's birthday—three months ago now—he saw Ginny aim a bludger at a _friend,_ in a supposedly friendly pickup Quidditch game, with what looked to him like deadly intent. And since then, he has heard Ginny talking about torture and murder in the dark watches of the night.

Harry stares at him.

Percy says, "She knows who gave her that book in her first year, and she's claiming first rights."

Harry shakes his head, and makes as if to stand.

Neville puts a hand on Harry's shoulder and indicates that he should sit. For the very first time, Hermione realizes that Neville is very much larger than Harry, taller by six inches at least and far more heavily built. If this were the Muggle world, it would be no contest; here, it's more Neville's determination than his size that makes Harry sit down, albeit unwillingly.

"When we went out to the pub, she had four firewhiskeys," Neville says. "And I understand that's become customary." He pauses to clarify. "_I_ generally stop at three, if all I'm about is getting stinking drunk."

Hermione feels a little shiver of repugnance, remembering what _she_ did on three firewhiskeys: with Ginny, and then alone in her parents' bedroom.

Percy lists the Potions that Ginny has been using, rather more often than indicated, and none of them recommended in combination with firewhiskey. And she's not been receptive to any comments on that matter, heeded the advice of her Healers, or (a nod to Hermione) followed up on referrals to specialist Healers.

Luna remarks that she shares a room with Ginny, and she's been woken up two or three times as Ginny wakes from nightmare, sometimes violently.

Dean clarifies what Luna did not spell out: Ginny has startled awake, screaming, and on at least one occasion reached for her wand to hex Luna before she realized who she was.

Neville adds, in a calm and matter-of-fact way, that Ginny is training to be an Auror, and as such, she will be trusted with means not given to the general population.

And, Hermione adds, she's been talking about people she wants to kick, or hex… which anticipation of personal score-settling doesn't bode well for the post-war situation.

Percy adds that yes, he has heard some of the loose talk in the Auror office, and doesn't like the sounds of it at all. It doesn't do to give the impression that the extrajudicial killings are originating with the Aurors, for reasons he's quite sure he doesn't need to spell out: not least that they don't want the Death Eaters reconstituting themselves as a self-defense society.

Harry blanches at that.

They've finally made an impression.

Neville follows up immediately: Ginny will listen to Harry, however much she might ignore the rest of them, because she loves him passionately. Hermione is a little taken aback to hear that kind of language—or eloquence—from Neville, and even more to hear the next thing: that he knows this because she told him so, the bleak night that they found out that Luna had been taken by the Death Eaters.

She told him that in confidence. To save her life he's willing to break that confidence.

Harry was their talisman, their symbol, the last glimmer of defiance in a darkening world, but to Ginny he was a beacon of another sort as well: the one, the only, from whom she has only distracted herself with others when he seemed out of reach.

There's an odd tremor about Neville's mouth when he says "others," that gives Hermione the absolute conviction that he was at some point one of those _others,_ and knew it, even before Ginny spelled it out for him.

So, Neville goes on, it's for Harry to take courage, the grim everyday kind, and stand up to his adopted family for Ginny's sake. Because they're ignoring what's going on; he saw enough of that on his visit to the Burrow, and it's not fair for Percy to be the one to carry this, when Harry knows perfectly well what Percy's position is in that household.

There's a very long silence after that.

Harry shuffles his feet, and mumbles something indistinct. Then he looks up and says, "All right. You've convinced me."

Hermione asks, "So what _specific_ thing are you going to do?"

"I'll take her to St. Mungo's to see Derwent."

Percy consults his pocket watch, and nods grimly. "Good. Because we weren't going to let you out of here until you resolved to do something. And I have five meetings this afternoon." He nods to Hermione. "And we _will_ be following up." He waves his wand, and for the first time, Hermione sees the shimmer of the elaborate barriers he had thrown up behind them, as layer by layer they disassemble themselves.

Harry is the first to leave, and Hermione is gratified to see that he's looking properly grim. When in doubt, appeal to Harry's penchant for playing the rescuer, but that took rather more than the usual force, likely because the Weasleys are involved.

Dean and Luna nod to Neville in what looks like gratitude, because he took on himself the task of telling what he shouldn't, and spared them. They file out next.

Percy smiles at her, and it's his battered-warrior smile, but with a little more cheer in it: as if the sun had come up on a ravaged battlefield that was the scene of victory for once. He shakes her hand vigorously, and departs.

That leaves Neville, who she realizes has deliberately hung back. He's wanting some sort of conversation, she can tell, but she doesn't have the time.

Really doesn't have the time, not for sir more-Pureblood-than-thou, in spite of his hero status. Yes, she's grateful for what he's just done for Ginny, but she's also remembering all too vividly the Bludger in the face, and how very much his 'Dark Lord' remark had given her the same sort of shock. It's not clear to her whom she can trust in this world, nor that anyone would take the same trouble if it were she who were plainly destroying herself.

That would be nothing more than the regrettable wearing-down of a once useful piece of machinery.

And speaking of useful machinery, she has some demographic estimates to review when she gets back to the Ministry: just how small this world is, from which they might begin to estimate the extent of the devastation wreaked by Tom Riddle's attempt to imitate the Final Solution.

She smiles at Neville, and thanks him for the eloquence which finally convinced Harry, which she can say from experience is no easy feat. Then she walks past him to the hallway and thence down the stairs to the common Floo.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger **

**(undated – mid October 1998)**

I just increased the encryption on this. I can't believe what I've done. The conflicts of interest. Oh gods, the conflicts of interest alone… but this world is so incredibly tiny that all kinds of relationships are going to overlap. Boudicca Derwent confirmed the demographic estimates I ran and didn't believe. Wizarding Britain is less than 17,000 people. Less than 0.005% of the population of these islands. And that was before the war. The Ministry of Magic employs nearly half the population. It's best thought of as the Ministry of Damage Control: all of those departments for controlling the propagation of magic, getting rid of questionable artifacts, chasing down those who overstep boundaries of acceptable use… not to mention hiding the wizarding world from the muggle majority. And as I've already learned, it's in the nature of magic to run out of control. Like technology, only easier.

They are outnumbered. We are outnumbered. Am I one of them or one of us? No wonder they're in a permanent state of siege. It explains why they're crazy.

For certain I'm crazy…

I never understood the bad boy thing. Or the thrill of interracial romance. Or the whole sleeping-with-the-enemy kink. I explained all that very cogently to Dean a few months ago. I told him about the merchant banker I turned down for a date because he was looking at me as an exotic (the girl who does magic with computers. Little did he suspect I did magic, capital-M.) That, and he looked too much like Draco. Oh yes, I specifically said that: _Dangerous. Alien. Not my kind. Never thought about him that way._

Ron and Viktor were boys. I never had them classified in my mind as Pureblood wizards or Quidditch players, however much everyone else teased me about collecting the latter. Draco, on the other hand…

Well, to start with, I think of him as Draco but I call him Malfoy. And he calls me Granger. Even in the throes of passion.

And I am _very_ much aware of our clothes. I am in jeans and hiking boots and sweatshirt, full muggle gear. He is all Pureblood aristocrat with his long hair and high-collared wizard's robes _with nothing under them._ (How did I make it all the way through school without that thought obsessing me? Must have been the war keeping the hormones in check.)

I play with his fine silky hair, card it through my fingers and then close them into a fist to pull his head back. I trace those fine-cut features, the sharp pointed nose and chin and the planes of his cheekbones. The pale blond hair, lashes, brows. He is not pretty, but he is the limiting case of a certain sort of breeding. I run my hands over his clothes and gloat to myself about the fineness of the skin I can feel underneath, how I can feel _everything_ through his robes_._

I suspect him of similar obsessions; he tangles his long fingers in my hair, complains about its kinks and curls—in a word, its _bushiness._ He's intrigued by the fastenings on my clothes, especially the zippers. Complains that my jeans chafe his skin but doesn't want me to take them off.

We bring each other off while removing as little clothing as possible, and except for the very last, we have our eyes open the whole time. It's very important to see each other in native costume while undone by passion. Half the thrill is _whom_ and _what_ each of us is doing.

He's flushed and damp and hard against my leg and arching up to get more contact and I've got him pinned to the floor with his robes rucked up and his hair spread out around his face. Not just a teenage boy minutes from coming, but Draco Malfoy, scion of umpteen generations of pureblood wizards. Son of Lucius, who would absolutely _shit_ to see how much his heir loves what I'm doing.

We call each other by name. The surname, and then everything--middle name and all.

"Draco. Abraxas. Malfoy." (In each pause, a kiss with lots of teeth, on the pale tender skin of his neck and shoulders. I hope he bruises easily; I want to mark him.)

"Hermione. Jean. Granger." (He follows my lead. I will have the marks for weeks.)

Neither of us knew the other's middle name before this.

Full name, surname, but never the given name alone. Hermione and Draco could be some ordinary couple—girl and boy, or woman and man. Granger and Malfoy, on the other hand, are a collision of worlds: tectonic plates grinding to make earthquakes, the volcanic islands of Iceland, the ring of fire.

Oh and what worlds:

"Bushy-haired Mudblood."

"Inbred Death Eater wannabe."

Then it descends to the playground insults:

"Know-it-all."

"Insufferable prat."

And then there's what we have in common, what we admire in each other, all considerations of morals aside:

He tells me how scary I am, how _powerful,_ how he could feel the crackle of wild magic when I returned his glare in the hospital wing and he knew he was a hair from death.

"Wildness, chaos—very Dark. Very Pureblood," he whispers, his voice husky with lust.

How there's nothing that can be hidden from me, how my ruthlessness fucking turns him on. Cursed contracts. Turning Umbridge over to the centaurs. Memory charming my own parents to keep them from harm.

"Shit, Malfoy, who told you about that?"

"Language, Granger. Potty and the Weasel were talking about it when they came on their _visit, _you know, to gawk at me_._ They were talking in the hall and didn't think I heard."

"Those idiots."

"Well, you get no disagreement here."

(That particularly moves him. He wishes he had been able to save his parents.)

I tell him how irrepressible he is, how he bounces back no matter what, how he's willing to take his life in his hands for the sake of getting off a zinger, how he makes no bones about who and what he is, what a fucking _brilliant_ solution that business with the vanishing cabinets was. (Hacked his way straight through the famous perimeter of Hogwarts. That's world-class.)

I had no idea a staring contest with commentary could be so incredibly _hot._

Afterward, I sober up, and then I spoil it. As he's shrugging his clothes back into place, I tell him that it made my skin crawl, the insults especially, because of all that's happened. Maybe in a hundred years we could role-play race war in bed for laughs, but right now it was much too close to the bone. In future, he can be my enemy or my lover, but not both.

That should put a stop to it. I still can't believe what I just did, and with whom.

He asks about the flying lessons.

"Well, that has nothing to do with sex," I say. "But no more games." I add, "And that means no more Quidditch drills." Because that's what started all this. My so-called friends knocked me out of the air at Harry's birthday party, but I will not take it from him.

However kinky any of this is, at least it isn't incest. I am not his cousin.

But he is Tonks' cousin. And I realize now that his insouciance reminds me of hers. If I ever have occasion to dress him in muggle clothes, it will be her boys' jeans and her funny T-shirts. Better not to think about that. He doesn't need to know that I had an unrequited crush on his dead and disowned girl cousin.

***

And how did this happen? He insisted on Quidditch drills. We chased the Snitch, and he forgot who I was and where we were, and when I followed him aggressively, bumping in midair, he checked me with the handle of his broom and sent me tumbling twenty feet through the air.

By the time I picked myself up, mostly unharmed but covered in grass stains, the Auror on duty had him flat on his back on the ground with her wand to his throat. Something was not right; I saw the deadly lack of expression on her face, and her lips were moving in a low-toned litany of threat, as his eyes widened in terror. As I approached, I heard her say to him, "And maybe those kids had the right idea. A nice Muggle-style beating might be just the thing for the likes of you."

I had to intervene and assure her that he would never play games like that again.

(Like the games my so-called friends played on me, but that's another story.)

I thanked the Auror for her trouble in breaking my fall. Then I marched him inside and threw him up against the wall and gave him a piece of my mind. How poor impulse control appeared to be the _real _mark of the Malfoys, and if he _ever_ did anything like that again, not only would I take my toys and go home, but he'd likely end up dead, because I wouldn't get between the Auror and whatever she cared to do. Not above a little emotional blackmail, I finished with a flourish: what would his mother think about _that _after the trouble she'd been to?

And at last count, he owed me his life twice over. At least.

I've learned from the best—I think that was a combination of Alastor Moody and Molly Weasley. And it would have had the desired effect, if only I'd minded the timing. He looked chastened for all of a split second, and then scared. If I had walked off at that point, it would have been fine.

But I had to add, "Malfoy, you idiot, I am not Harry Potter." And I didn't drop my hands from the front of his robes.

"No, Granger," he said. "You're the one with the bushy hair and the teeth. The _girl_ one." Then the pointy-faced git actually _smirked._ I would have smacked him one right then if he hadn't suddenly gone very still, and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he was looking at me intensely with his lips slightly parted. Amazing to think someone with his ice-cold features could look sultry, but he managed it. Very softly he said, "Granger, you're _very scary_, but you should be careful."

He pronounced "very scary" as if it were another way of saying "dead sexy."

And something shifted. I could feel his body heat and smell the fresh air on him, and a little tang of sweat, and the indefinable other thing that was his own scent. I could feel my knuckles, wrapped in cloth, sliding against his chest. His bare chest. _Naked under our clothes, _I thought.

"Careful of what?" I said. The air was electric.

"Your reputation," he said. "You already have a name for collecting Quidditch players."

I should have given him a good push toward his rooms and a firm order to shut it. Instead, I lifted my chin and looked him in the eye.

"And Purebloods," I said. Plain provocation. I felt the tension go up a notch. _This is reckless, _I thought, and continued anyway. "Which would make you the crown jewel of the collection, wouldn't it?"

I was feeling distinctly lightheaded by this point. It must have been the adrenalin. And the awareness of just how irresponsible I was being. And maybe just shock, because suddenly I was _curious._

I added, "Or you could think of it as a chance to rectify _your_ reputation for somewhat narrow tastes."

He closed his eyes, and said, "Granger." Turned my surname into a deliciously dirty word.

I moved in and put my lips up to his ear, breathed into it, "So, _Malfoy,_ what do you say?"

"_Yes._ Gods, yes."

And that's how it happened.

***

Another dream about Tonks, which is probably worth writing down in view of what happened yesterday.

It's the café again, after the war. The same one as before, and in this dream, oddly, I remember the other dream, as if it were something in the real past. The interior: glass and beveled mirrors and little red chairs. Tonks is sitting behind a shiny black table on one of the red chairs and it's real, it's quite real, because her hair is just the shade of pink—wobbling between fuschia and magenta—to clash wildly with the red chairs, which are crimson. It gives me a 1960s pop art migraine.

And she speaks, which she didn't before. "Wotcher, Hermione." And then, "This coffee could raise the dead," and she offers me a little black octagonal demitasse in a shiny black saucer.

I take it, lift it to my lips. Bitter. Needs some sugar.

I spoon in the white sparkles. It isn't sugar but ground glass, and I know that.

And she smiles, and it's razor blades. When I embrace her, she's ice. The table disappears. I feel ribs, a skinny ribcage pressing against me where breasts should be. All the color has drained out of her face, her hair is hoarfrost or platinum, and we're caught in the polar ice with blue auroral light flashing around us like neon. And I still want to hold on, because if I let go she will disappear.

Oh no, I think, this is one of those dreams where I'm going to find a skeleton in my arms, a six-months-dead corpse. No, I didn't ask for this. Please no.

It's rare in a dream that I know that I'm dreaming.

The eyes are North Atlantic hypothermia. "Sorry, Granger, you picked the wrong cousin," and the voice is not Tonks but Draco, and the mouth that descends to mine is the mouth of a vampire or an incubus, something that doesn't breathe air.

My dream-self notices, as my waking self never did, that their speaking voices are actually in the same vocal range, where tenor and contralto overlap.

I wake up before that ice-cold kiss can suck out my soul.

***

My dreams may be confusing the two of them, but Draco is not Tonks. Not remotely. She was an Auror, a member of the Order, and she died fighting. I _have_ his records. I'm reviewing the damned file even as I write this. He was on the wrong side, mostly because of his parents, and he was ineffectual and cowardly. Not that I should complain about that, since it probably saved us. He hemmed and hawed and mumbled and "wasn't sure" we were who we were. I was the one that Lucius and Narcissa identified, not Harry.

And I saw his arm. He has the Mark. I saw it when I held his wrists over his head, and he knows that I saw it, because I felt him flinch. It's fading, but it's still ugly and knotted and even where the darkness is gone you can see it in relief. It goes down to the bone and he'll probably have it for the rest of his life. Did he wake up the morning after the battle and feel that thing on his arm and know he'd have it forever? I flinch when I see it even though I know _exactly_ what he did and didn't do.

Riddle really _hated_ the ones he marked, didn't he? From what I saw in the depositions, he seems to have singled out Draco and his father for individual humiliation. Certainly I saw first-hand what he did to Neville. _Set him on fire._ The Purebloods in his inner circle, he tortured and humiliated, and a pureblood who wouldn't come over to his side he tried to _burn like a witch._

I wonder if Riddle hated the Pureblood aristocrats more than I've ever been able to manage. Maybe even more than he hated the likes of me.

***

**Author's note:** Hermione's demographic estimates come from JOdell's essay on the subject, which includes numerical estimates provided by a guest commentator with training in demographics. Estimates on the size of the wizarding world vary considerably depending on assumptions about how many other schools of witchcraft and wizardry serve the British Isles, or if Hogwarts is essentially the only one.


	30. Chapter 30

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Author's note:** Those who have read my short piece "Childhood's End" will recognize the second half of this chapter.

**Posting schedule:** We'll be trying for no more than a week between chapters for _Amends_ and _Princess_, but the editing is in a very tricky state just now. Thanks for your patience.

***

October at Hogwarts, in the Scottish mountains, is really the beginning of winter. It's begun to grow seriously cold, and Hermione has cast warming charms under the canopy of the bed and drawn the drapes closed, and finally it warms to something like _room temperature._ The dormitories were rather better set up than this improvised warren of rooms, she thinks.

She's wrapped in her favorite nightgown, the red flannel that makes her feel as if she's wearing a warm fuzzy blanket. It's just like the one she had as a child, and as she curls into the covers, it seems that she can feel a red glow, garnet or burgundy, through all the layers of covers and her closed eyelids.

She remembers curling into the bedclothes like this and her mother saying, "Wake up, sleepyhead." She can hear her mother's voice, and she recognizes in it what she didn't before. She heard the same note in the voice of Dean's mother, when she spoke to her daughters or her son. He spends so much time there because he's cherished, and that was so for her as well. Her parents showed it in serious conversation, gifts of books and chemistry sets and computer kits, and solicitude when she didn't quite fit in at school…

…no, she never fit in, not before, not in primary school, and it stabs to the heart when she remembers her hope when that letter lay in her hands, that this was the answer and she was going to find her place among her own. That she'd never be lonely again, or ridiculed, or ostracized…

At first the tears are a hot prickle in the sinuses and a burning in the eyelids, and then she feels them well up under her eyelids. She sniffles a bit, trying to suppress them, and her head starts to ache, and she thinks: who bloody cares anyway? No one is going to hear anyway; these walls are thick. It's a fortress, or a dungeon. No one in this world cares what becomes of her; she is useful and that is all.

This is what she's been choking back all this time anyway, and from experience she knows that it's best to just let it take its course like a thunderstorm. She'll feel better after…

..that's rationalization, of course, because what sweeps over her is the absolute conviction of abandonment, that she's here utterly alone, like the dreadful time in the tent when Ron abandoned them, and worse, after he came back and both he and Harry avoided her… Never mind how many times that had happened before. How she'd thought that spark of passion on the eve of battle was going to make up for everything… well, it didn't. Passion isn't to be trusted; it's as unruly as Fiendfyre. She didn't trust herself to cast that, and she never felt the least temptation to love potions, for all the jokes.

It's always terrified her, the idea of being led about by her feelings. Now, in this world, it's made her paranoid about her food and drink, like a mad king.

It's a relief to sob aloud and to know that no one is going to hear, and at the same time there's the conviction that even if they did hear, they wouldn't care…

_You always were rubbish at Quidditch._

_You really are the next Dark Lord._

_Annoying but useful._

Then there's the memory of Dean's mother thanking her, which sets her off again because it's such a tiny little crumb, and she's so hungry, and the people who are her own, who brought her into the world and would care what happened to her, don't remember that she exists.

Alone on an ice floe, on a mountaintop, in the night so dark it has no dawn, in the dungeon depths… that's whence the wolf that howls through her bones. She will be civilized later, she will be grown-up later… for now, she's choking on tears that feel as if they're blood. It goes on and on, that weeping, until her chest hurts from gasping. It's a raw, ugly, runny-nosed sorrow, the grief of the ugly child.

And after it has wept itself out over the grey ocean, she tumbles into the deepest sleep she's had since the war, an utterly starless, dreamless night in which she does not hear the knock on the door, that knocks again twice, three times, and then falls silent.

***

The next morning she wakes in the dark with her alarm clock (the mechanical one, for the electronic one does not work at Hogwarts), dresses in the dark, and walks to the Great Hall for breakfast. The daylight outside is brilliant; it's one of those rare clear October days that make the death of autumn almost beautiful. The sky over the Great Hall, which once more is enchanted ceiling rather than open sky, shows cold blue streaked with cirrus, as if someone had dragged a feathery paintbrush across it.

Breakfast in the Great Hall is still miraculous, all the things she likes best appearing on the plates out of nowhere. She still remembers Harry, skinny and all the more pale for his wild black hair, staring at that first feast… and how she wondered that anyone could look so hungry in a _modern country._ Yes, she's sitting more or less in the same place; this would have been the Gryffindor table, and over there, at the far end of the hall, bare and empty in the morning sunshine, is the table that would have been decked in green and silver. The war orphans avoid it as if it were cursed, crowding into the remaining three tables.

She's eating, and thinking about how this meal will have to take her through the day at the Ministry and then St. Mungo's. Then she turns to the problem waiting for her at work. The thing she loves about programming in the wizarding world is that you can _see_ the data; the structure and the interface are the same, a shimmering net of jewels. It settles her, always, thinking about an interesting technical problem. Derwent has warned her that in the next month or so they're going to be putting her under Fidelius. They are still working on getting the full set of ledger books of Malfoy Manor from their hiding place in Gringotts, so (cynically) she thinks, the real secrecy isn't about the list of defendants but the results of the auditor's report. The dirtiest piece of this isn't about the mass graves or the corruption of the Ministry or the disasters unfolding in the post-war—it's the money, and what they plan to do with it.

Even in full morning light, this place is full of ghosts: she's sitting next to, across from, the invisible presences of Ron and Harry. She doesn't want to think about all the conversations, the arguments, the reading that took place at this table…

Then, suddenly, it's quiet about her; the cacophony of morning conversation in a hall full of children is suddenly stilled. She looks up, and Neville is sitting across the table from her, having just cast _Muffliato._

She composes her face, as she's done every time they've met since that incident—which is to say quite a bit—and prepares to be polite and correct.

He says, "I know you probably don't want to talk to me, and I can't say I blame you."

She looks at him steadily. Those tears last night helped, because she doesn't feel the usual dammed-up feeling. Between the one-off with Malfoy and a good cry, she's feeling quite restored this morning.

He says, "I didn't understand until I said it aloud myself. We made Harry into a lot more than he really is. We had to. We needed a hope, and things were bad enough that hope had to be superhuman." He sighs, and looks down, as if the words he needed were written on the table, then meets her eyes again. "Harry's a good bloke, but he's only human." Another pause, during which she notices that that he's blushing again—he's always flustered easily—and then he says, "And you're only human. I think I got so angry at you because I expected more, and that wasn't fair. I've been thinking about that memory charm, what that must have been like."

She sits quiet, waiting to hear what he's going to say next, because this isn't at all what she expected.

He says, "Nobody had easy decisions in the war. And the _Crucio…_ well, Harry's a hothead, and I knew he was angry about what the Carrows had been doing to us." He pauses, staring at his hands. "The kids think it was great, you know; they talk about it all the time, how Harry Potter cast an Unforgivable and got away with it. I'm scared for them. They don't understand that we call them the Unforgivables for a reason. I don't want those kids going to Azkaban, and I don't want them turning into torturers."

She's not sure which of the offenses to bring up. "You condescended to me about being Muggle-born."

He shakes his head. "No. At least that's not how I meant it. I've been thinking about it a long time. You're as good as you are because you _work_ at it. You wanted in, where I wanted out. And you were the one who showed me what it meant to be a wizard. If it weren't for the Defense Association, I wouldn't have been _anything_."

She would get up and go away, because otherwise she'll be late for work, except that the time-turner means never having to worry about being late again. He's explaining himself, not making excuses, so she's inclined to listen.

He's afraid of what's bearing down on them, which no one else seems inclined to see. Why did no one else pay attention to the story of where the last threat came from, the ballad of the orphan Tom Riddle? Perhaps he's hyper-vigilant, but once you've lived through the regime of one Dark Lord you don't want to sample the experience again. The children are harder-edged than they should be at their age, and he knows he is as well, harder on himself and harder on his friends.

Sprout just told him to take a day off, because he hasn't had one in weeks; she's positively forbidden him to stay on premises during the Halloween holiday, and what's more she's involved his Gran in it, so he's going home directly after the Ministry ball.

He knows he doesn't know everything, because he's had it rather forcibly impressed on him that he's been running himself into the ground while being noisily solicitous of everyone else's health. It wasn't until after that committee meeting that he fell apart, thinking about just how close to death Ginny is coming.

He tells Hermione that he didn't see Ginny's sickness when they were out together in the pub, no, because Ginny was not the one he was watching.

He knows that he's done his part to make her life difficult. He let fear override friendship and it's probably too late but he's sorry. What haunts him is that they are the victors and everything they did is being taken as an example—even things so trivial as the blue beaded bag are being imitated slavishly.

She tells him, finally, how he strikes her of late: the Stone God, archaic and unbending. That's the reef on which everything broke: his judgment and his demands, and Derwent told him as much, didn't she?

He nods. Yes, she had a good look around his head, by invitation, and he won't say it was a pleasant experience. He wants her to know he's been for his first appointment. He's feeling sheepish that he's seeing St. Mungo's foremost expert in spell damage for something he knows is ordinary counseling on the other side of the border—except, his NHS card to the contrary, he can't cross the border for this, because over there he can't say what he's lived through.

She nods, and realizes as she lets out that deep sigh, just how tense she's been. She says that it's hard enough to be working as hard as she's been, without that weight of judgment on her. Hard enough to live up to her own standards without worrying what's going to be visited on her by friends—that is, if she has any left. Which she isn't sure.

And that's when he reaches across the table and takes her hand and holds it and says that he was an overbearing, judgmental ass, and he's not the stone god, he knows he isn't, because Sprout and Derwent both have made that more than clear.

Gran, too. She told him… His voice trails off as if there's something he's hesitant to repeat.

She leans forward. "What did she tell you?"

Almost in a whisper, he says, "That I should go after my heart's desire, and never mind what anyone else had to say about it. But I've pretty well made a mess of that, haven't I?"

She says, "You have an apprenticeship and real prospects and you _belong_ here…" Unexpectedly the bitterness comes through; those tears last night didn't purge all of it. "You're one of them, and they care what happens to you. I'm just _useful_, until I run myself into the ground."

There's a very long silence.

She breaks it, eventually. "You reproached me for not asking for help, but no one came forward to offer it. I can't assume it's going to be there, not in an emergency. You said it yourself: it's always been other people asking me for help, not the other way round. When I told you what I did, _when I had no other choice,_ you accused me of being the next Dark Lord. I did what I had to do, and I'm not going to apologize for that. I'm not going to say I didn't do harm, but I'm not going to say I'd do it any differently."

She stands up and gathers her things.

"And this is the last time I'm going to explain myself to you." And she knows she's still angry, because she adds, "You don't deserve it."

He looks at her with that downcast expression she realizes she hasn't seen in years. "No, I suppose I don't. I'm not much of anybody…"

She's sharp with him. There are more choices than "not much of anybody" and the great stone god.

He asks her, if he's ever told her about his first kiss.

No, of course she hasn't heard that story.

It was the summer after fifth year, and he had been leaving the house, to see his friends from primary school, when he heard his name in discussion. In his experience, that never boded well, so he hung back to listen.

It was Gran, in conversation with Andromeda Tonks, about a marriage contract. And then there was another voice, which he recognized immediately: her daughter. Tonks, whom he'd thought of as jolly and cheerful.

Not on this occasion. She was furious; she was shouting that she bloody well was not being dragged into more Pureblood nonsense by her mother, she'd had a bellyful already and this was the last straw—to have her mother negotiating behind her back to be given away to a fifteen-year-old she scarcely knows, just because she trained under his father's mentor… she didn't want the yoke, the ball and chain, of a traditional Pureblood marriage and her mum could take that and _do with it as she liked_, because there was no family fortune to hold over her, she was of age, and hell would freeze over to the ninth circle before she'd marry Neville bloody Longbottom.

Andromeda stalked to the Floo, said with icy grandeur that she'd see her daughter at home, and vanished in a flare of green. Gran retired to her study.

Tonks turned and saw Neville, and immediately looked mortified, which was no more than he felt. He wasn't keen on being married off, either, but her words had said it all—he was nobody anyone would want.

She apologized, because it hadn't been meant for him to hear, and anyway it was nothing personal. It was just as she'd said, she had no intentions of getting married. She said she was sorry, because she was always sticking her foot in it when she wasn't tripping and falling downstairs, ….

She told him someone _would_ fancy him, someday, and it was much better to wait than to be locked into an _arrangement._ And then she kissed him. On the forehead, which probably doesn't count, but still it was something, like Ginny telling him that he wasn't _nobody_. Which is why he feels the urgency he does about Ginny not dying, even though he's the first to admit that she's behaved very badly.

And it's why he feels so bad about making Hermione unhappy, and he wishes he could wipe out having said that about the next Dark Lord, because except for the Body-Bind Curse in first year, she's always stood up for him, even if it was nothing personal and no less than she'd do for anyone else.

Which, she realizes, is a sideways way of saying that he doesn't think she has any particular feelings for him, that she did it all on principle in more or less the same way that she helped him to rescue Malfoy from a lynch mob…

…well, _that_ case she doesn't particularly want to contemplate just now, because Potions revision could be _very_ awkward, not to mention this week's flying lesson.

He says, finally, that it isn't words that will make it up, but he regrets what he did.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – mid October 1998)**

Saturday. Another flying lesson and the first NEWTs revision session in the Potions classroom.

Which is to say, a double serving of Malfoy, and second thoughts on my part.

He knows what he's about, both with flying and with Potions. He's competent, and his manner is refreshingly professional.

No, let me correct. It's been quite professional in the flying lessons since July at least, and the surprise is only that it continues to be so, given that last week I had him on the floor and was doing rather personal things to him while telling him how I found him politically unacceptable. This week, even when he was correcting my technique, he was unfailingly polite. Not a hint of anything untoward.

I remembered what Neville told me, that he's afraid of me and that the lessons serve to double his weekly flying time. That makes sense. I like it when things make sense, and it's in character for Malfoy to be self-interested. It's not in character for him to be polite, but it strikes me that he's been so in all of our dealings for the last two months—well, except for last week, and I was scarcely polite either.

It appears we've made an unspoken pact not to touch on that, which is something of a relief.

In Potions revision, the entire group showed up: Ron, Harry, Luna, Neville, Draco, and me, as well as Slughorn, who told us that McGonagall had requested he be present, and the Auror who was guarding Draco.

They all looked at me, so I said, "Well, I suppose we ought to sort out partners…" and then Ron and Harry gravitated, and Neville looked at me and nodded. There was a very long pause, because that left Luna and Draco. Draco bit his lip and looked down. Luna walked over to him without a word and touched him on the elbow, and to my great surprise he didn't flinch. He looked up, and she smiled at him, and that was that.

Harry said that there might be other people showing up from time to time. He asked how we would handle that.

I said, well, if we follow the revision schedule exactly, they'll know what to expect, although advance notice would be helpful. Would Harry like to be in charge of those inquiries? And did everyone agree with the schedule as written? There were nods, and then Draco tentatively raised his hand, and when I nodded to him, he said we might schedule a day for special topics.

It turns out that he did get additional tutorial from Professor Snape. And the 'special topics' include Wolfsbane Potion. Even Slughorn took notice at that, to tell us that it wasn't generally in the scope of the NEWTs, but he would certainly be interested. Yes, Snape did play favorites, but for once we're going to get the benefit. (And then I remembered Draco sharing out sweets from home with his cronies in Slytherin.)

Afterward, Ron and Harry came up to me to ask who the _hell_ that was who had shown up Polyjuiced as Draco Malfoy.

Neville told me at dinner that he's been like that since the Hogsmeade visit at the end of September, when we encountered Madam Rosmerta and then the Dementors. He's been very quiet, almost withdrawn—not at all the mouthy pest we knew in school. Rather as if he's thinking it all over. And it's clear that he knows who's responsible for the permission extended him to join us in the Potions classroom, because he saw Slughorn look at Neville.

***

On the eve of the Decommissioning. Tomorrow morning at ten o'clock I will step through the Floo to St. Mungo's, meet Derwent at her office, and proceed onward to Malfoy Manor. My clothes are laid out on the chair by the fire: Tonks' black jeans, her furry black tunic, my best hiking boots—tweaked to look like black dragon-hide—and a severe set of black dress robes. I tried them on just now in front of the mirror and it commented favorably. Well, it said that I looked like the earthly representative of the Furies. Nicely put. I like a mirror that knows its classics, because that's exactly the look I'm aiming for.

Everything's in order. I should be able to sleep.

Derwent was quite clear that I didn't need to bring parchment or quills. No writing implements at all, in fact. I am there as an observer; there's already a note-taker, the Secretary of the Task Force on Decommissioning. I have no real role at all, really; she was quite clear on that.

I can't sleep.

So what is it that I'm dreading?

That room. The master and mistress of the house. The last time I saw them, they were eagerly scanning my face to see if I were in fact the wanted fugitive… and deciding that I was, and handing me over to be tortured.

No, that's not quite right. The last time I saw them, they were sitting in the Great Hall, bruised and disheveled, huddled protectively on either side of their son, who looked even worse with his torn robes, sooty face and singed hair. But I don't count that, because that's not the picture that haunts my dreams. Their humiliation is a coda, a footnote.

When I lie down to sleep, the face on the back of my eyelids is actually out of date. It's Lucius Malfoy in the pride of his power, five years ago in Diagon Alley, sneering at me and then smiling his jaguar's smile at my parents. One month before my thirteenth birthday, the last day of my childhood. He talked over their heads to Mr. Weasley, saying, "I thought your family could sink no lower."

The ensuing fist-fight between Mr. Weasley and Mr. Malfoy shocked me. It's not that I'd never seen grown men fight, but they both looked like grown-ups, dignitaries even, and they came to blows in a bookshop. That was even more scandalous than brawling inside a church.

I still remember my parents' silence afterward, behind Mrs. Weasley's reproaches to her husband. That was the first time I had ever seen my parents terrified, and the worst thing was that they were trying to hide it from me. As far as they were concerned, I was still their little girl. To this day, I curse Arthur Weasley for reassuring them of their safety and telling them all about his Muggle Protection Act—and the backstory for why such a thing was necessary. My parents are not stupid people, and they're not politically naïve enough to think that mere laws are going to keep them safe, especially when Arthur made such a point of this being a revolutionary change.

That night, I couldn't sleep, any more than I can sleep tonight. I knew they were talking it over, out of my earshot. I saw my mother in their study before supper, looking over all of the correspondence from Hogwarts, and I guessed that they were going to be deciding if I should be allowed to return there. I was furious at the idea. If they did that, it would be backing down, and I wasn't going to be intimidated, not by Draco Malfoy's father. And the truth is, that's how I thought of Lucius, because he looked just like Draco, and I assumed he was as little to be feared, in spite of everything that Arthur Weasley told us. Two people couldn't look so much alike and not be the same in character, I thought.

That thought proved that I was still a child.

I lay in bed for a long time, and after a while I heard them talking downstairs. The staircase had a blind turning, an eavesdropper's perch I'd used before. I crept out of bed and tiptoed to the head of the stairs.

I heard my mother's voice say, "He's a school governor."

My father said, "It's her choice."

She said, "What kind of school lets a war criminal sit on the Board of Governors?" I heard a rustle of parchment. "And his son is that nasty piece of work she wrote home about. A little sneak, no better than he ought to be."

"I don't think you have to worry about the son. He's all talk, by the sound of him," my father said. I mentally congratulated him for getting it right in one. Draco was irritating but not fundamentally dangerous, even with backup from daddy.

"I'm worried about the father. If even half of those stories are true, he could make things very difficult." She paused. "He has a dangerous face," she said.

I thought about that one, because I'd been looking at that face myself. Lucius Malfoy was actually the first grownup with whom I'd engaged in a staring contest. He'd looked at me with that sneer, and I'd looked back, and I hadn't given way. I'd felt as if I were being immersed in icy water; the man radiated chill. His features might have been attractive in their symmetry and sharpness were it not for that expression of arctic contempt. It wasn't the sneer that bothered me. He hated me all right, but he recognized me. It was the smile that succeeded it, when he looked at my parents. That was a predator's smile, lips pulled back and teeth not quite showing; the look in his eyes reminded me of Draco eyeing Neville, except _more so_: a bully sizing up perfectly helpless prey and mulling over the possibilities for tormenting it.

My parents were the pillars of my world, but they were defenseless in the face of threats from that other world. He could have killed them right there, and not even used an Unforgivable. It would have been sufficient to loft them fifty feet up and drop them to the pavement. Under existing law, it would have qualified only as "Muggle-baiting."

That fact turned my stomach over. I was reassured that my parents recognized the danger—well, they were never oblivious—but that might work against me. What if they refused to let me go back to Hogwarts? Not that I would have thought it in so many words at the time, but _damn_ Arthur Weasley and his helpful historical lecture on Voldemort and the Death Eaters. Mr. Weasley was nice, but he was the least discreet person I knew.

Well, except for Draco Malfoy. If they let me go back to school, I swore I was going to pay attention to anything that Draco said that was prefaced with "My father says." The boy was daddy's little intelligence leak, and I had every intention of making use of that direct line into Death Eater central.

_If_ my parents would let me go back.

"It's her choice," my father repeated.

The argument went on for some time. Interestingly, they never touched on the danger to themselves, only on the risk I might be facing. They had heard about the troll incident, of course. Mr. Weasley had told it, when he was talking about what good friends Harry, Ron, and I were. Ron was making mortified faces but it's not as if he could kick his dad to tell him to stop talking.

I went back to bed after an hour or so, because it wasn't clear that they were coming to any conclusion, and my eyelids were growing heavy. I didn't want to fall asleep and be found on the stairs.

The next morning, the subject came up at breakfast. My mother said, "So, _some people_ object to you because your mother is not a witch and your father is not a wizard. The thinking would appear to be that we're inferior stock."

I nodded.

She continued, "I see that you had the highest marks in the first-year class." She had a parchment with a list of names. All of the Hogwarts first-years, my schoolmates, color-coded by house; I saw my name in Gryffindor red at the top. (I'd long ago learned to read upside down; it was an important skill to have when dealing with those in authority.) She smiled, and I felt proud, because it wasn't often that my mother pointed out my accomplishments. Doing the best was simply expected. She said, "So that Mr. Malfoy we met yesterday is a racist, and no gentleman. I don't think he should be encouraged in his opinions."

"So you'll let me go back?" I said.

"Of course, no question of that," my father said. Then he added, "I do feel a bit sorry for that runty little fellow, the son. I wouldn't think his father thinks much of him. Not much in the schoolroom, and too young for sport."

"You'll be careful," my mother said to me. It wasn't a question.

"Yes," I said. I was already being careful, and I was sketching a list of other books I might take a look at before classes got seriously heavy. You couldn't go wrong reading up on history, because it had such a way of repeating. "Thank you for letting me go back."

I resolved that I was going to be discreet with them in future. The less they knew, the better. This was just a veiled threat, and they had actually considered not letting me go back. I also resolved that I was going to learn everything I needed to defend myself and them as well. They would _not_ be casualties of someone's resentment of me. Whoever meant them harm—be it Lucius Malfoy or Voldemort or the devil himself—would have to come through me first.

Across the border, on the other side of the Leaky Cauldron, I was going to have to be their protector. That realization was the end of my childhood.


	31. Chapter 31

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Well before ten o'clock in the morning, Hermione has reported to St. Mungo's. She's standing in front of the great fireplace in the Spell Damage department.

Boudicca Derwent looks at Hermione. "I see you're ready, then." The Healer's glance takes her in head to toe: her clothes, which cover her from the chin down, Tonks' tunic and jeans, the heavy boots, and the dark formal robes, as well as the heavy winter cloak she's carrying on her arm; her face, which she knows is pale and set, in spite of the hearty breakfast she ate this morning at Hogwarts.

"I'm ready," she says, lifting her chin and feeling quite sure she's telling a lie.

"Very well then." Derwent takes Hermione's arm, tosses a handful of Floo powder into the flames, and together they step into the great hearth. "Malfoy Manor."

They step out of a white marble fireplace into a room Hermione knows altogether too well by its repeated appearances in her nightmares. It's the gloomy drawing room, only somewhat improved by the autumnal afternoon light.

The room is bare of furniture, except for a rickety improvised table and a number of canvas folding chairs of the kind people bring to outdoor concerts. There's a skinny youth in scarlet Auror's robes who informs them that the necessary personages are being summoned. He bows slightly to Derwent and goggles a bit at Hermione before darting out of the room.

Seated on the other side of the table is a young woman in dove-grey formal robes with a matching Alice band in her long curly hair. She looks vaguely familiar, and clearly Hermione looks vaguely familiar to her as well, for she extends her hand in greeting. "I _think_ we might know each other from Hogwarts. Penelope Clearwater, Task Force on Decommissioning."

Hermione gives her name, and they recall that they both know Percy Weasley, though not that Penelope is Percy's lost love. It is a shame, too, Hermione thinks, because they are so plainly of the same tribe: ambitious young Ministry scriveners, fiercely doing their best to rebuild things under the New Ministry.

Penelope looks at Derwent over the silver frames of her oval reading glasses. "The Engineering Consultant will be coming from the formal gardens," she says. She consults the parchment before her. "That's the second and third intermediate perimeters." Derwent nods.

The young Auror sticks his head back in. "We're still looking," he says.

Penelope sighs. "Try the little parlor off the ballroom. The one with the red sofa."

He nods and disappears.

***

A few minutes later he reappears, escorting Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. He gestures to them and then to the canvas chairs. The gesture is partially accomplished with his wand, which Hermione knows is _very_ bad manners, especially when dealing with the wandless. Lucius comes in first, looking distracted and twitching his robes away from his body; he sits down, elaborately arranging the folds over his lap. Narcissa follows, flushed and nervous, and seats herself in the chair next to him.

Hermione sits with her hands folded in her lap as everyone in the room waits, ostentatiously not meeting each other's eyes. Lucius and Narcissa seem younger than she remembers them. Well, that was a very different perspective, as a terrified and bound captive. Now they're the captives, in their own home, or a reduced version of it. The chandelier hangs above; someone must have repaired and re-hung it. Several tiers are missing lustres; she wonders if they just threw out the shattered bits rather than fixing them.

She steals glances at them by looking blandly and neutrally in their general direction and taking them in as part of the picture. They look at her the same way from time to time, but chiefly they look at each other, sidelong. At one point she sees a tiny smile curve Narcissa's lips, and an answering smile on Lucius' face.

She realizes that she thinks of them as _Lucius and Narcissa,_ not as Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy. Emnity is an intimate relationship too, and she and they have had encounters enough to establish that fidelity. Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy would be parents of a school friend, not people she's faced in battle. Just as she thinks of Ron's parents as Molly and Arthur, regardless of what she calls them when she talks to them, because they've fought alongside her. However much she might dislike Molly Weasley, she'll never forget the moment when she pushed Hermione, Ginny and Luna aside and dueled Bellatrix to the death.

Surreptitiously she watches the dialogue of glances between Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. There was a flicker of apprehension on Lucius' face when he first saw her, but her own bland manner and good-child posture (hands folded in lap, ankles crossed) seems to have reassured him. He turns his head very slightly to look at Narcissa's profile, and she acknowledges him with a quick sidelong glance. There's something very familiar about this by-play…

It reminds her of her parents, who used to flirt with each other in the same quiet and understated way.

And in fact the Malfoys' distracted manner on entering the room reminds her of her parents too, specifically one afternoon on their skiing holiday lo these many years ago, when she came in from the slopes earlier than expected and they leapt up from the little couch in the parlor of the chalet, very pink in the face. Which she was too, as soon as it dawned on her that she'd walked in on her parents snogging on the couch like school kids.

Penelope's exasperated sigh and her advice, "Try the little parlor off the ballroom. The one with the red sofa." More like the prefect she was, policing the halls to make sure no one gets up to anything naughty, than a Ministry operative in charge of dangerous prisoners. Even though she _really _doesn't want to know, she wonders what Draco's parents were getting up to on that sofa.

***

There's an unearthly shriek from the grounds, and the young Auror startles. "I'll never get used to those things," he says to Penelope in a conversational tone. "And I don't see the point of _white_ peacocks. Why breed a bird to have no color?"

Hermione sees Lucius narrow his eyes and flatten his mouth to a thin line. It reminds her of Draco's expression, the way you see realized in a hard-edged ink drawing all that was potential in the tentative pencil sketch. He says nothing, and she finds that she is avoiding his eyes, and that she has been doing so all along. They're the same pale grey as his son's; in the no-colored light of the overcast afternoon, their transparency reminds her of water. When by chance those eyes meet hers, she thinks of the North Atlantic and death by hypothermia_._

There are muffled voices and footsteps outside. The young Auror says, "That should be the Engineering Consultant," and darts a complacent glance at Lucius that seems to say, _Now you're for it._

The door opens again to admit a second Auror, a young woman with short wind-ruffled hair, and the Engineering Consultant, an older woman with a sharp-cut profile who's muffled in a heavy black cloak. The Consultant throws back the hood of her cloak, extends to Hermione her very vigorous handshake and tells her how good it is to see her even in this ill-omened place. Hermione recognizes her immediately: Mrs. Longbottom. Neville's Gran. Without her trademark vulture hat.

Mrs. Longbottom turns to Boudicca Derwent. "There's something queer in the signature," she says. "Can you have a look at them before tea?" She gestures to Narcissa. "First her, then him."

Derwent offers her arm to Narcissa Malfoy, who rises and accompanies her out of the room, trailed by the second Auror, who is inconspicuously but far from casually covering both women with her wand.

She then turns to Hermione. "Almost a shame to decommission it," she says. "A museum piece, really. Might be one of the last two or three in Europe done that way. Old-fashioned blood magic, some would say Dark, but very effective."

Mrs. Longbottom is talking about the defenses of Malfoy Manor; what's afoot, of course, is the dismantling of those defenses. Decoupling them from the blood of the family, which appears to be a more complicated matter than the original coupling. It's being done under expert medical supervision, given that Boudicca Derwent is here very much on official business.

Oh. _Very like memory charms, eh my lass?_ That thought in Mrs. Longbottom's sardonic Lancashire voice.

There _would _be the question of what she's going to do about that house if her parents ever decide to sell it. (The Ministry likely would take issue with a magical hazard zone nestled in the heart of the London suburbs.) She supposes at that point she'll have a somewhat embarrassed conversation with Augusta Longbottom, much in the spirit of the conversation she had with Boudicca Derwent three months ago.

Mrs. Longbottom has gone on to talk about the cleverness of the original designer, particularly the manner in which he or she aligned the Manor's defenses with the thaumaturgical field lines to maximize power. Hermione doesn't recognize the specialist jargon, but she does recognize the characteristic enthusiasm of engineers everywhere for a sweet problem as sweetly solved.

"It's a shame we haven't a National Trust, like the Muggles do," Mrs. Longbottom says. Hermione makes an effort to keep her face neutral, because a giggle wants to bubble up at the picture of Lucius Malfoy and his wife staying on at the Manor as tour guides for gaggles of wizarding tourists. She doesn't entirely succeed, because a tiny smirk quirks her lips.

Lucius sees it, and glares at both of them openly. Apparently Mrs. Longbottom does not find him a scary man at all, because she turns to him and says, "Don't look at me in that tone of voice, young man. If you hadn't been such a fool as to mix yourself up with Voldemort, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

Very like the tone she took with Neville about losing his toad, only less indulgent, which takes it into the negative. Lucius quails before it and settles both his face and his posture into what she can only think of as good-little-boy. Then she remembers that Mrs. Longbottom is a half century older than Lucius. From her point of view, he _is_ a little boy.

Nonetheless, Neville's Gran is impressive: no wand deployed, no Killing Curse on surrounding underlings _pour encourager les autres_, just pure force of personality and she's got Lucius Malfoy _behaving himself_. Hermione resolves to take notes.

***

Narcissa returns under guard, and as soon as the door opens Lucius half-rises to meet her, which gesture is quelled by the young Auror with a short sharp movement of his wand. Narcissa is glowing, there's no other word for it; there's a tiny smile on her face that turns broad and tender as she looks at her husband. He flushes, patches of pink on pale cheeks, and sits down again, settling his long-fingered hands on his knees.

A few minutes later, Boudicca Derwent beckons to him and he stands, and they leave the room under the escort of the young male Auror. Hermione's puzzled momentarily by the same-sex guard detail, until she remembers he's being taken away for a medical examination.

Mrs. Longbottom shakes her head; apparently the exchange of glances needs no translation for her. "I might have known," she says, looking at Narcissa. She turns to Penelope Clearwater. "I'll talk to McGonagall and have the boy down from Hogwarts, and we'll take care of all of that in one go."

Penelope makes some notations on the parchments before her, and nods. "You'll stay to tea, then?" she asks.

"By all means," Mrs. Longbottom replies, then turns to Hermione. "So how is our Neville? I don't hear much from him these days."

Mindful of Narcissa's presence, Hermione gives her a quick sketch of Neville's current duties, without mentioning Draco or the problems with the war orphans. Mrs. Longbottom nods. "Not easy, cleaning up after wars," she says. "Would that the ones _starting_ them would mind that." That sally is plainly meant for Narcissa, and perhaps even more for the absent Lucius. "Still and yet, Neville should be better about keeping in touch. A Floo call every other week doesn't tell me as much as I'd like."

"He's been busy," Hermione repeats, not wanting to specify further. Some of the "busy" is his duties with Narcissa's son, and she's quite sure that McGonagall's mandate of "appropriate discretion" about Draco's condition probably extends to his parents. This is confirmed when the young woman Auror opens the door to the drawing room and Hermione hears Derwent say, presumably to Lucius, "Your son is of age; you'd best ask him."

They all sit down in the canvas chairs around the makeshift table, except for the young male Auror who stands to summon a battered tea set on a large enameled tray. It's Ministry issue, which is to say that the pot and the cups are all from different sets, and it's clearly seen better days. The tray settles gently onto the table. Penelope Clearwater turns to Hermione and says, "Will you do the honors, Miss Granger?"

There are only seven chairs; the young male Auror chivalrously offers to stand, until his colleague sarcastically reminds him that he _did_ take Transfiguration, didn't he? In retort, he Transfigures the battered footstool by the fireplace into a Louis XIV armchair and pulls it up to the table, scraping its legs against the floor. Lucius cringes at the noise.

The light is fading, and in the gloom Hermione is afraid of remembering what happened here. She's been furtively triangulating, using the location of the fireplace and the chandelier, to recall where it was that Bellatrix stood while torturing her. Drab and empty in the dying autumn light, the room seems determined to maintain that nothing has ever happened here since the sixteenth century.

Meanwhile, acceding to Penelope's request, she presides over the tea table. She pours out the tea and offers lemon, milk, sugar. She proffers the meager plate of biscuits. She finds herself addressing those assembled as Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy, Mrs. Longbottom, Miss Clearwater, Healer Derwent. (She doesn't know the surnames of the two Aurors.) She's in a play, as the Daughter of the House entertaining family friends in the sort of isolated manor that has incited genteel English girls to revolt since the eighteenth century.

Mrs. Longbottom takes her tea plain and declines the biscuits.

Boudicca Derwent takes her tea with lemon, as does Penelope Clearwater. Penelope dithers delicately and then selects a shortbread. Boudicca Derwent declines.

The two young Aurors each take a lump of sugar, and then fence like brother and sister about the other's preference in biscuits. (She takes a chocolate one; he takes a shortbread.) Apparently this is a long-running joke between them.

Mrs. Malfoy takes lemon and sugar in her tea. Mr. Malfoy takes a tiny splash of milk and more sugar than she has ever seen a person put in a cup of tea. Mrs. Malfoy takes a chocolate biscuit and then notices that there are no more chocolate ones left. She puts it on her husband's plate, tenderly glancing at him from under her eyelashes, and takes a shortbread instead.

Hermione surmises that Draco comes by his sweet tooth honestly. She also has the dreadful conviction that if the rest of them were not present, Narcissa would have fed that chocolate biscuit to her husband by hand and he would have nibbled her fingertips. The glances they are exchanging do not belong at a proper English tea table, and they're all the more unnerving because of the strong resemblance between the two: they look more like brother and sister than husband and wife. Hermione is deeply embarrassed to realize that Draco's parents are crazy in love, which strikes her as unseemly on a number of counts. They're a married couple in their forties, they're on house arrest for war crimes, and there are five other people at table with them.

They ply her with sidelong questions about Draco and how he is doing, and she answers with the sort of thing that would be in character and true if she didn't know what she knew.

"Yes, Mrs. Malfoy, he _seems_ to be in good health."

"We don't travel in the same circles, but I _suppose_ he's eating enough."

"No, Mr. Malfoy, we're not playing Quidditch at Hogwarts these days, but Draco _is_ getting outside regularly to go flying."

***

They put the tea things away, and looking very like an ancient sybil, Mrs. Longbottom kneels before the fire to Floo Minerva McGonagall at Hogwarts; a few minutes later the flames flare tall and green, and one of the Aurors from Hogwarts steps through and turns with his wand covering the fireplace; then Draco steps through, with another Auror holding his arm (the one who had been threatening him on the Quidditch pitch), followed by a third Auror.

The moment he sees Hermione, he tries to slide his glance past her as if he hadn't really seen her. His expression remains neutral, but his cheeks, then his forehead, then even his exposed neck turn a very bright pink that reminds her of fat sunburnt tourists at the seaside. She looks away, as well, to meet the pale-blue eyes and suspicious expression of Narcissa Malfoy.

Mrs. Longbottom invites Hermione to accompany her to the outer perimeters, for this is the last stage of the Decommissioning. Grateful for her many layers of clothes, she pulls on her cloak and follows the little procession: Mrs. Longbottom in the lead, her dark cloak snapping in the autumn wind; Draco's escort of Aurors, one ahead, one behind, and the brown-haired one holding him by the arm with an expression of distaste on her face, as if the contact were contaminating, and Narcissa with her escort.

***

It is the last stage of the process, now. The outer walls have fallen, and now they are standing on the inner perimeter, the last of the walls before the house itself.

In the darkness of the formal gardens, Mrs. Longbottom casts arcane patterns with her wand that throw an eerie light, red like leaping flame and green like the Killing Curse. She motions Draco to the focus of the pattern, and as he stands in the autumn wind, hugging himself for warmth (for he wears no cloak) she raises her arms in a wailing Latin incantation and the light plays about them, flaring bright and then gradually dying back, until they are plunged once more into the darkness of the countryside. Hermione looks at the lowering hedges of the maze and wonders what lies inside… and attempts to triangulate again, from the few landmarks she can discern in the darkness, where it is that the mass graves lie.

***

Inside, the tea things are taken out once more, and Mrs. Longbottom tells Hermione that she's looking forward to her remarks on the report, and extends an invitation to her: a long weekend at Longbottom House, mid-November, with supper on Friday night and the next two days in the country, plenty of walking with 'our Neville,' should it please her: with time aplenty to ask any questions she might have about the Decommissioning or other matters of occult engineering. This time it's quite clear that it's all business, and Hermione wonders with a quiver of hope if this might actually be a _prospect,_ for those sharp eyes have been watching her all the while as she's watched the proceedings, have watched her jotting down questions and notes for her journal.

She's surprised to have felt nothing in this place, though she's not so sanguine about what might happen once she falls asleep tonight.

Draco is standing to one side, sipping his tea and shivering, and finally she asks Mrs. Longbottom if she might cast a warming charm, as she's feeling chilled. Mrs. Longbottom nods, and then watches with a shrewd expression as Hermione casts it wide enough to encompass both herself and Draco. As soon as he feels the warmth, there's a softening in his expression, quite as if he might cry, and then a look that if it were anyone else, might be one of gratitude.

She looks up to see Narcissa Malfoy's cold eyes on her.

Derwent is saying something about celebratory Firewhiskey, were it not for…

… and her voice is cut off, as if by _Silencio,_ as Derwent's glance meets that of Draco's mother. Hermione recognizes that silence: she's heard it fall between her parents when she walked into the room. It's the silence of the adults _not speaking of matters in front of the children._ She and Draco would be the children, she supposes, and feels annoyed once more that she's still excluded from the real secrets.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – mid October 1998; cross-reference against the report of the Task Force on Decommissioning)**

It's fascinating to watch a master at work. I don't understand the details at all, but just watching the _authoritative_ movements; she has everyone moving to their appointed places in this dance, and I can feel powerful currents shifting direction as she unbinds them from the particular flesh and blood before me. Very old magic this, the magic of property, blood and bone of a family bound to earth and trees and sky of a particular place.

Somewhere in that October bleakness are stones mortared together with blood in the cement. You cannot make a place your own unless you give it something of yourself, something alive, your blood or bone, sometimes your beloved child bound in sacrifice.

She is unweaving that, a tricky business indeed. A very tricky business, and I begin to think about what I have done in my parents' house, but it's the only way that I can contemplate sleep there. If I sleep alone, it must be behind a palisade with Powers standing guard. So she's wrong: it's not the last one in Europe, but the last one of the old style. The new style uses rather different elements.

There's a part of me that would like to show her what I've done just to get her estimate of my level of mastery. Their books, of course, hide more than they tell, so I have to rely on conjecture, on imagination and guesswork… just as I did with the memory charm on my parents.

The defenses of my parents' house didn't kill me when I crossed the barrier, so they must be working all right. They shouldn't kill my parents, either, because I am blood of their blood and bone of their bone.

Looking at Augusta Longbottom, I think of Neville. _Imagine being raised by someone that unreachably old._

He's old after his own fashion, too, for he didn't have much of a childhoood: the first part of it spent in fear and apprehension of rejection (if not accidental murder) and the last part of it, to the brink of manhood, preparing for the cataclysm we all knew was coming. But it's one thing to learn that it's coming when you're fifteen, as I did, and quite another to have lived with the knowledge all of your life, along with the estimate of others that you're going to be inadequate to the challenge when it comes.

I remember now that when he threw out that defiant refusal, 'I'll join you when hell freezes over!' his Gran was in the crowd on the battlements… He meant to go out in a blaze of glory, then, even if burning to death is not a fate that anyone would choose.

At least, for once, his courage had an audience.

But he is hard, and unbending, and quite sure of his own righteousness… just as I am, just as I can be. After years of worrying about ethical drift (and doing a fair bit of it, as naturally happens in war) I've been outflanked on my unprotected side.

Oh yes, and no one is speaking to me. No one who matters, and not about anything of substance. There are days—today was one of them—on which I wake up and think that this is how the New Ministry is going to take me out… not in a battle, but by the slow grinding attrition of overwork.

Yes, I'm tough, but I'm not bulletproof.

That reminds me. There are interesting things they've turned up in the north. There were minor guerrilla battles there, and when they turned up the graves, it seems that some of the other side—the Death Eaters—died of gunshot wounds. Massive numbers of rounds of automatic gunfire, enough to kill an ordinary mortal at least five times over.

_We're tough but not invincible,_ Neville had said to me. He spoke truly.

Rabastan Lestrange, among them, appears to have tried trespassing on a restricted area of an American airbase. He did not live to tell the tale. I don't want to think about what that might mean.

He appears to have lived long enough to have been evacuated by his comrades, and then buried in an unmarked grave.

Very, very interesting.

Mrs L looks at me shrewdly; I wonder now what her real role was. She's the most prominent name in those parts. Did the Ministry send an Auror to her house to take a hostage or to capture a guerrilla chieftain?

If the latter, it would make sense that it runs in the family.

Gunshot wounds. Now _that_ is a picture. It took an inhuman number of rounds of automatic gunfire to kill Rabastan Lestrange, and from Derwent's conjectures about the remains, it didn't kill him right away.

***

Except that I am spending this oppressive October afternoon in the room in which I was tortured, this is probably the most tedious day I've had in months. I'm restive without work; I am watching someone else do work I don't half understand (and won't understand better by watching). I think yearningly about my desk and the work on it, the tasks to be done that await my particular touch…

…and that's the desk in both worlds, oh yes there is more than one desk; there's the one with the computer on it, at the bank; there's the one in my old bedroom where the laptop waits, alongside a pile of parchment; there's the cubby at Hogwarts and the little office at the Ministry with the racks of memories glowing in their vials.

There are things to be writing, and things about which to be thinking: the sentient beings committee, for which I have committed to research, further afield than they originally intended, but I am learning that they spoke truly when they said they were giving me carte blanche. No one thus far has drawn the line about what I may request, and it doesn't hurt that the librarian at Durmstrang recognized my name and wrote back by return Owl that he was Viktor's cousin.

What a very small world this is.

I wonder how far it is from implosion. I went back to the demographic estimates again, and ran some models using the postwar casualty figures. It doesn't look good. If I stay I may find myself drafted into some sort of forced reproduction regime. I'm thinking of Mrs L's remarks vis-à-vis Molly Weasley… well, no, she never mentioned Molly by name, but we all knew whom she meant.

What fools they were. Things were bad enough to start with; before Voldemort, they were merely teetering on the brink. Now they may have pitched over.

One of the hubristic fools is being dealt with today. Henceforth this will only be an ordinary piece of land; it's no longer an extension of anyone's body, soul, or dynastic line.

***

**Author's note:** The death of Rabastan Lestrange is borrowed from a hint in tambrathegreat's AU fic, _You Can't Always Get What You Want._ (See my Favorite Authors for a link.)

Both the Task Force on Decommissioning and the Temporary Ad Hoc Committee on Dispensing (Percy Weasley's charge) are borrowed from hints by A.J. Hall in _Lust over Pendle, _although there are no indications that her Dispensing had any connection to refugee affairs. Hall is also the source for the technical specification of the perimeter defenses of Malfoy Manor. The notion that it is (or was) Unplottable is my own, from suggestions in canon.


	32. Chapter 32

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Posting schedule:** From now through the end of May 2010, _Amends _will be updated on a weekly basis. This is to permit the remaining material of this novel (yes, it's a novel) to be drafted and edited in a timely fashion.

***

The day of Halloween, it's been bright and brisk, and the evening is turning blustery. Choirs of candles rank on rank float in the air over the tables, and at the high table, McGonagall presides over the teachers. Below, the students sit at their tables with their Heads of House and assigned pair of Aurors. Draco walks in, his first appearance in the Great Hall in months, and sits down alone at the table once occupied by Slytherin House. His face is set in bleak disdain. Hermione thinks of this expression as The Prince in Exile; he won't grant an inch to his adversaries and pretends that nothing has changed.

It's not clear, in this brave new world after the war, where she and Neville are supposed to sit at the Halloween feast. Neville is going to the Ministry ball that night, and from there to his grandmother's for the remainder of the weekend. They're late to dinner as it is; he was delayed by some last-minute matter with the children he's been overseeing in the greenhouses. Hermione saw him with them, and recognized some of them from the pack that had attacked Draco back in the early summer. They turned their heads in a group as she walked into the greenhouse, and watched her silently, like feral cats. She saw the little girl that had been the ringleader, with her reddish hair and sea-green eyes, who is rather taller than she was, having just begun to grow lanky and awkward.

Feeling quite conspicuous, she follows Neville to the empty table where Draco sits. They seat themselves across from him; she sees him stiffen in affront and then, a few beats later, relax.

Neville eats absently, reviewing his work. She thinks about the laptop in the upstairs room at her parents' house, in her old bedroom. She has one last piece to finish on the current project at the bank. There's one niggling bit that refuses to resolve, but she knows that one day away will give that to her and then she can wrap up the project.

There's almost no conversation; Neville has set aside his plate and is scratching away with his quill on some notes he has to finish before they leave for the ball. Draco is dispatching his meal with delicate fastidious bites (as if he couldn't be doing something as plebeian as mere _eating_). She feels awkward sitting across from him at table. It's too close; they should be glaring at each other from half the hall away.

She's learned by now that the more ill at ease he feels, the haughtier his manner, but it's still disconcerting. She wishes she had a book. She concentrates on spooning soup into her mouth as if it were a task requiring surgical precision and feels the eyes of the students on her back, inquiring as to why she's sitting at the table of the enemy.

She stands up mechanically when the Headmistress dismisses them and the teachers file out from the high table. Neville gathers up his work and gives her a brief, absent smile. She stands up and turns to see the little girl with the pigtails staring at them. Wilhelmina. Doesn't remember the surname. _Killer Hufflepuffs. They move as one beast._

She follows Neville out of the Great Hall to the apprentices' corridor, and ducks into her own tiny room to dress for the ball. She'll wear her serviceable periwinkle robes once more. She stands in front of the mirror, twisting her hair into a loose curly chignon and weaving a strand of blue beads through it. Neville will be washing up and then putting on his dress robes. There's a knock on her door.

"Give me a minute," she says, pinning the last of the hair in place. She's surprised that he's ready this soon. She opens the door. It isn't Neville but Draco. He blinks, looking at her in her regalia. _What's the matter, Malfoy? Never seen a girl before? _ She doesn't say that. In fact, she doesn't say anything.

Nor does he.

She takes advantage of the silence to look at him, a long appraising glance. His hair has grown out and in the last months someone, probably Neville, has trimmed it so that the back no longer looks brutally hacked off. He's looking at her and not saying a word. Which all in all is not a bad thing, considering the words he has said, to her and to others: _Mudblood. Blood traitor. Poor as dirt and breed like rabbits._ Second-hand insults, chosen as weapons. She has no idea what he would say if he spoke on his own account.

He's looking at her—with his clear grey eyes and porcelain skin and sharp features—and the tip of his pink tongue darts out to lick his upper lip, nervously, and then he catches his lower lip in his teeth. _My nervous mannerism, _she thinks, _how does he come to be copying that? _

"Granger," he says. "I …" He pauses. "I hope you enjoy the Ministry ball. Maybe… I'll see you after?"

"If I don't come back too late," she says.

It's making her distinctly uncomfortable. She's reminded of the encounter weeks ago. _No, I didn't do that, and if I did, it's not going to happen again._

Neville opens his door and steps out into the narrow hallway. "Hermione, could I borrow that household spells book? I need to get the wrinkles out of these robes…" Draco turns his head to look and smirks at the sight of Neville in his rumpled dress robes.

"No problem," she says, going back into her room and pulling the book down off the shelf. She flips to the chapter on Clothing, finds the page, and hands the book to Neville. Draco turns and walks back into his own room and closes the door.

***

After the ball, well, after she steps through the Floo with Minerva McGonagall into the Headmistress's office, she goes right to her rooms.

At least she didn't have to Apparate to Hogsmeade and then hike up to the castle after curfew, because they wouldn't have let her in. The night is windy and cold, as befits All Hallow's Eve, though it's past midnight now. They've crossed midnight into the place between the worlds.

The dance music is still sounding in her ears. It was the annual Ministry fete to celebrate the end of the First War with Voldemort (informally known as Harry Potter Day). It was attended by an older crowd, and for the most part a Ministry crowd. The most modern of the dance music was waltzes with the occasional fox-trot, since many of the witches and wizards there were young with the century. She had to sit out the quadrilles and minuets, since she doesn't know the steps.

Almost as soon as she entered the ballroom, Horace Slughorn took her arm and led her to the punch-bowl to offer her a glass, and then invited her to dance. To say the least, his conversation did not confine itself to pleasantries. By Slughorn's address of her as "my dear girl" and his informed inquiries about her work with the War Crimes Commission, she is quite clear that she's reckoned as a rising power by the moderates among the purebloods. The good Professor was decked out in green velvet with a silver watch-chain, Slytherin colors, though discreet insofar as snake motifs were not in evidence. Unpleasant memories of Voldemort's familiar Nagini bid fair to make them unfashionable for some time to come.

They did get down to business, at the beginning of the second waltz, when he spoke of his concern about "the honor of Slytherin House." He wants her to know of his willingness to testify that not all of the seventh-year students under his charge went over to Voldemort. In particular, he's still quite upset about the fate of the Zabini boy, and he wants her to know that Millicent Bulstrode gave him invaluable help in managing both the evacuation of the underage students and the summoning of reinforcements. As far as she knows, Millicent is still unaccounted for and presumed dead in the first wave of reprisals. Slughorn didn't have any different information, but he seemed to be reassured by her insistence on fairness in the upcoming trials. Cynically, she suspects that's because it favors his particular interests. The pureblood old guard doesn't seem particularly strong on general principles.

***

It was an older crowd at the Ministry ball, and a Ministry crowd, but there were exceptions.

At the tables off to the side sat younger people, some of whom she recognized from Hogwarts and in particular from Dumbledore's Army. They seemed to be having more fun than she was. Seamus Finnegan was laughing arm in arm with both Patil sisters, and showing them a clumsy version of an Irish jig; they were laughing too, imitating the steps and kicking the stiff pleats of their dress robes into wild swirls. Dean and Luna were talking intensely, and she saw Lavender Brown talking to Bill Weasley. Lavender was wearing high-collared robes in ultramarine and silver, which set off her honey-blonde hair and fair skin better than the pastel tones she'd favored at school. Fleur Delacour was talking to Justin Finch-Fletchley, who was looking improbably handsome in dark purple velvet.

Until he turned, briefly, and she saw that the lower left quarter of his face was crisscrossed with livid white scars. Scars fully as ugly as the ones on Bill Weasley's face. She tried not to stare.

And then she remembered what Neville had told her about Lavender having a long recovery from her wounds, and the constellation she'd seen made sense. Lavender, Justin and Bill all had been attacked by Fenrir Greyback. As she and Professor Slughorn turned through one more figure of the dance, she looked again at the two pairs in conversation: Lavender and Bill, Fleur and Justin. They had the look of _family._ And she didn't remember the way Justin dressed when not in school uniform, because he hadn't been in her House, but she did remember Lavender, who was the queen of the plunging décolletage.

This had plainly changed, and she wondered if the scars were the reason why. She wondered, too, how extensive they were, and felt ridiculously lucky to have come through the battle untouched—at least physically. She wished she could go over there and talk to them. Suddenly she felt isolated here on the dance floor, talking politics with an old Slytherin power-broker eighty years her senior.

Slughorn intercepted her glance and understood it. "My dear girl, you must understand that you've been lifted to a great height. Along with your confreres," and he nodded toward the sidelines, where Neville's Gran was talking to Minister Shacklebolt while Neville stood by her side, and then to the group a little further on, where Ron and Harry flanked the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Ginny was standing by Harry's side, not holding his arm but nonetheless looking very much married. "There's a price to pay for every good thing. And you, my dear Miss Granger, have always struck me as more than willing to pay it." He sighed. "In some ways, you would have fit better in my house than the one into which you were Sorted."

Hermione couldn't let that pass. "Professor Slughorn, I wasn't aware that Slytherin House even admitted Muggle-borns." She doesn't add what really curdles her blood, which is the thought of sleeping in the same room with Millicent Bulstrode and Pansy Parkinson.

He sighed again. "Not in your day, certainly. Thanks, alas, to the influence of young Mr. Riddle." He gave her an improvised spin, definitely not a waltz step but in time to the music, and said, "Ambition and purity of blood are by no means the same thing. If I may say, old Salazar tripped himself up there. Outsiders are often the most cunning. Or failing that, the most energetic. Our world is too small, and our work too large, to scorn that energy. Which is why I have always striven to be most ecumenical in my choice of protégés."

She glanced over at Harry and Ron, and for a split second she saw a look of longing—or was it fascination?—on Ron's face. It hadn't been directed at her, but at the table where the Dumbledore's Army contingent was making merry along with Bill and Fleur.

No, not just at the table. If she wasn't mistaken, he was looking at Lavender. Molly's words struck her in a different light now—as a warning. She'd have taken them so, had she still been interested in Ron, but truthfully, all she felt was relief.

***

Hermione smiled to Neville across the room and was taken aback at how much his face brightened when he caught sight of her. She resolved to ask him for a dance, but on coming off the dance floor with Slughorn, Boudicca Derwent intercepted her and took her around to meet various Powers in the Ministry. Some of them she already knows, but the introduction isn't the point; rather, it's being shown off as Derwent's protégée; that much she understands of politics. Even her conversation with Neville's Gran is much more formal than would be warranted by their current acquantanceship; Mrs. Longbottom called her Miss Granger and went through the ritual of introducing her grandson, "whom you may remember from Hogwarts." It's pure theater, of course, though she's not clear of the meaning behind the glance of wry amusement, almost a wink, exchanged by Healer Derwent and Mrs. Longbottom. Then they went on to meet the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, who had Harry, Ron and Ginny by his side along with some of the senior Aurors.

***

After the round of introductions, Boudicca Derwent looked at her with a shrewd smile and said, "Well, you've been long-suffering, and one should have some fun at a ball." She said, "It's not all politics, which is the impression I see you've been forming."

Hermione felt a certain pang at having been so obvious.

The look was apparently transparent to Derwent, for she added, "I saw you looking at your young comrades when you were dancing with Professor Slughorn."

"Who said I ought to have been a Slytherin," she replied. "Clearly he was mistaken. He was reading me like a book and so are you."

Derwent looked at her seriously. "You're a very young person in a very old world," she said. "Professor Slughorn has eight decades more experience than you. As for myself—I don't know if you're aware, but Headmistress McGonagall and I were at school together. In the time of Grindelwald."

"And Tom Riddle," Hermione adds.

"Yes, I remember him as Head Boy. A very handsome fellow, but cold as ice." Hermione is on fire with curiosity; the questions pile up in her head like a rockslide coming downhill: _What was he like, when he was still human? And, more frivolously, who fancied him and did he fancy anyone? Or was he in love only with power even then? And what was he like in classes? _Derwent saw that too, apparently, for she took Hermione's arm to point her to the Dumbledore's Army table. "Now, no more politics, or history either. The old guard is retiring to bed soon, so talk to your friends, or dance. There's plenty of time for questions later."

Hermione felt shy, suddenly, faced with the table full of her friends, and even more uncomfortable, because now Ron was sitting next to Lavender in conversation. From this angle, she could see that Lavender's face was not untouched, either; there was a livid, puckered slash across her right cheek that reminded her of an old-style German dueling scar. It must have laid open her face to the back teeth. Except there were two lesser slashes running in parallel, because that mark was not made with a sword but with fangs or claws.

It was Fleur who rescued her from her state of transfixed fascination. She rose, all blond glory and Veela glow, and glided toward Hermione, took her hand, and led her to the punch bowl. "Here, cherie, have something to refresh you," she says. "You have been dancing all night," and she _winked_ as she handed the faceted crystal cup to Hermione. "And you must be thirsty after talking to all those old courtiers."

Hermione thanked her and sipped the punch. Fleur continued, "Don't worry. They're not paying attention to you." She cocked her head in the direction of Ron and Lavender.

"Everyone is reading me like a book tonight," Hermione replied.

"I've learned to watch," Fleur said. "None of it made sense to me when I first came here."

Hermione felt chastened. "The language barrier," she said.

"Yes," Fleur replied, "English is a difficult language, and Weasley more so."

Hermione laughed. "I never got fluent in Weasley, I think."

Fleur replied with a wry smile, "Neither did Bill." The music struck up again, a wailing dance tune in a strange meter. "Oh, let's dance this one," she said, taking Hermione's hand. "You'll like this dance. It's Bulgarian."

Briefly, Hermione wondered if that was an obscure witticism about Viktor.

Others rose from the table and joined them. It was a circle dance, like a child's game but with intricate steps. Fleur took hold of Hermione's left hand and Luna skipped up and took her right hand.

They raced clockwise, turned, raced in the other direction, stopped in place to do some kind of intricate kick. Hermione glanced at Fleur's feet to see what they were doing, and then gave it up when she saw that Seamus and the Patil sisters were looking at those feet too. And Dean, and Bill, and Luna. Justin was looking too, but sidelong, trying to look as if he knew what he were doing. No one except for Fleur actually seemed to know the steps, and Hermione decided that she was having too much fun to worry about it. The circle closed as they all stepped inward, opened as they raced backward. They dropped hands, turned in place with hands on hips, joined hands again and raised them.

For a brief moment she felt like a little girl playing ring-around-the-rosy…

_Ashes, ashes, they all fall down._ Everyone in that jolly circle was a war veteran; there was Seamus across the circle, with Parvati holding his right hand and Padma his left; Parvati held Luna's hand and Padma held Justin's, and Justin held Dean's, who held Bill's, and back again to Fleur.

They were moving as one big animal, just as they moved together on the battlefield.

The circle whirled faster and faster; Hermione felt her robes billow out and her hair fly around her face, coming loose from the chignon. Across the circle, Seamus' fringe flopped in his eyes, the Patil sisters' braids whipped and twisted behind them like snakes. Briefly she glimpsed Ron and Lavender, alone at the table and still in conversation.

As the dance ended and the circle broke up, she saw Bill put his arm around Fleur, who rested her hand on her belly and _glowed._ Fleur glanced up, saw Hermione watching, smiled at her, and nodded.

If she read _that_ right, Fleur is pregnant.

***

The next dance was a waltz, and to her surprise, Justin came over to ask her to dance it with him. She smiled awkwardly and assented, because she had the sense it was something more than social. Everything at the ball thus far had been so. And she knows, by rumor at least, that Justin is not interested in girls—not romantically, at least—but politically, well this may well be political, because some kind of interest was gleaming in his eyes as he took her hand.

He was smooth, though, and she was reminded a bit of Nigel. Yes, and rightly so—they come from the same circles, she'd warrant, although she didn't get a chance to ask. He asked after her work at the Ministry, and said what good things he had heard about her work with the Committee on the Status of Sentient Magical Beings.

She smiled with some bitterness. "Not much of a committee so far," she said. "They send me to do library research. And there are all sorts of questions no one is ready to pose." She added, "They're not including Dementors and werewolves under the scope of the committee." Justin's social smile twisted a little and she saw why it was asymmetric: the scars on the left side of his face pulled on it.

He was steering her gracefully around the dance floor, and she was trying to honor the ancient convention that he was leading—yes, and it was _away_ from the other couples, and _out_ of earshot of them, that he was leading her, she noticed, and wondered once more how much political business is transacted at Ministry balls and lunches at the Leaky. "Yes, that was a concern of ours," he said. "So we've been talking, and we thought it would be nice if you'd pay us a visit."

"Who's us?" she asked.

"A little social group," he said. "We meet up at Shell Cottage a few times a month. Bill and Fleur host us, and Andromeda Tonks has been so good as to join."

_Andromeda Tonks. Teddy's grandmother. Tonks' mother. _Hermione was still trying to figure it out, as he added, "We've been reviewing the details of Umbridge's werewolf legislation."

_Aha. Remus' mother-in-law._

"And we were thinking you might have some valuable insights." He smiled that asymmetric smile again, the one that looked perfectly normal if you saw it in right profile or three-quarters view. "Everyone laughed at S.P.E.W., but I've been reading up and I rather think you had the right idea. Organizing, I mean, and a mass campaign."

"If you're meaning to overturn the Umbridge rules, I think it's an uphill battle at this point. Greyback did us no favors, even if Umbridge made his job easy. But people won't hear that now, not since the attacks on Hogsmeade and Ottery St. Catchpole."

Justin's smile broadened. "You're already saying 'us,'" he said.

She sighed. "I suppose it's rather a broad 'us,' isn't it? Werewolves and Goblins and House Elves and Mudbloods."

"Arthur Weasley is on our side, as well," Justin said. "Bill's experience has made an impression on him. And he wrote the report on the reprisals at Ottery St. Catchpole."

Hermione hadn't heard about those, and shook her head, as Justin steered them into an unoccupied stretch of ballroom. The crowd was thinning as midnight approached.

"They've been killing captured werewolves," Justin said. "At first it was just throat-slashing, and then…" he paused, "it rather degenerated. The details are not appetizing." He added, "Three-quarters of the captives were under seventeen. Teenagers and children. Our schoolmates, if they had been permitted…"

She said, "But none of you are full werewolves."

Justin's smile vanished. "No, but they're treating us the same as if we were. Bill works for the Goblins, and I have… other resources, but some are not so fortunate. So pure self-interest would justify changing those rules." The last notes of the waltz sounded. "We can continue this later, if you're interested," he said. "May I send you an Owl?"

She smiled. "Certainly."

***

By the time that she had a free moment in which to ask Neville to dance, he and his Gran had departed. She felt a twinge of regret, because he was going to spend the rest of the weekend at Gran's house.

At that point she saw Percy Weasley, standing by the punch bowl trying to look like a spectator rather than a wallflower. She went over to talk with him, and spent an informative hour getting updates on the work of the Committee on Dispensing and the refugee problem.

He's still having trouble getting enough help and funding, and thinks that the Ministry doesn't understand the extent of the problem. He corrected himself: Minister Shacklebolt is quite well informed, and luckily his previous liaison work with Ten Downing Street has given him a good sense for Muggle politics. But the Minister isn't the Ministry, and that's the problem. There's serious resistance to restoring jobs and perquisites to Muggle-born Ministry workers ousted under the Thicknesse Ministry, which resistance is led, not surprisingly, by the Purebloods who collected the spoils. And necessarily those functionaries are none too sympathetic to the Muggle-born wandless, and see many and better uses for Ministry budget than the refugee problem.

They drank punch together and talked and finally Hermione lifted her cup in a toast: "To Dispensing. And to your health, Percy." They clinked glasses, and then Percy said shyly, "We can talk shop and dance at the same time, you know."

Photographers had been circulating all through the evening, but as she was dancing with Percy, she becomes aware of the galaxy of flashes going off around her. _Rita's going to have a field day,_ she thought. _She'll have me engaged to Percy by press time tomorrow._ Then she decided that she didn't care, and danced a second waltz with him, before the Headmistress found her to tell her that the last of the Hogwarts delegation was headed home.

***

She steps through the Floo after the Headmistress, feeling rosy and cheerful and full of plans. Very like the stereotypical young girl coming back from a ball, except this is not about beaux but politics. Justin Finch-Fletchley has turned into a werewolves' rights activist, it does seem, and Percy Weasley is keeping her apprised of the refugee problem (she really ought to make another lunch date with him) and Boudicca Derwent knows things about Tom Riddle that sound very, very interesting. And Professor Slughorn is courting her as well, and that's certainly no more personal than Justin's interest. Though she doesn't agree with him at all about her having been "lifted to a great height." It's certainly no excuse for neglecting the people who really fought the Battle of Hogwarts.

She nods to the Auror at the entrance to the apprentices' corridor, who tells her that Malfoy was looking for her earlier. She wonders what that's about, and thanks her for the information (no, he didn't say what he wanted). She's thinking about the books waiting for her, and thinks she'll stop in and change out of her dress robes before she goes to find him.

Malfoy must have heard her footsteps in the hallway, because he intercepts her.

She's surprised to see that he's dressed in full regalia as if he had been going to the Ministry ball: high-collared black dress robes with a touch of green and silver embroidery at the collar and the border of the sleeves, in a heavy fabric that moves like dense silk. His hair hasn't grown out enough to tie back, but he's combed it back from his face and it falls around his shoulders. He doesn't say a word, but takes her hand, bows deeply—no, it's almost a genuflection—and kisses it. There's something about the archaic formality of the gesture that sends a shiver down her back.

He looks up at her. "I've been considering your ultimatum," he says. She's puzzled and must look it, because he adds, "You said enemies or lovers but not both. I've made my choice." He straightens up, still holding her hand.

Oh. She remembers now. "Enemies or lovers but not both." What she said to cut things off after that adrenalin-fueled tussle on the floor of his room, what was that—three weeks ago?

He says, "I have enough enemies. I don't suppose I would notice if I had one less."

She stares at him as if she's never seen him before. This is a game, or a joke, or some kind of wind-up, because there is no way that Draco Malfoy just propositioned her. Rather politely, too.

She decides to take it as such. "I was too clever by half," she says. "Of course, I would prefer we not be enemies. But there are other options."

He looks at her very steadily. "I liked what you did," he says.

"I'm not calling you names again, if that's what you mean," she says. "That's done. And the whole thing was just adrenalin, and you know it. You never liked _me_ particularly." (Understatement of the year, she thinks.) He looks puzzled, and she realizes she's made another Muggle reference. "Adrenalin. Fight or flight. You can mistake it for attraction."

He continues to look at her. "If we're not going to be enemies," he says, "I think I need to thank you." She looks at him. "For getting my parents out of Azkaban."

"It wasn't just them," she says. "And it was more a point of principle, frankly."

He ignores her, and pushes on. "And for keeping those little monsters from—from hurting me. I thanked Nev—Longbottom—for killing Nagini. And he told me _you_ killed something else—I wasn't clear, but something that let Potter finish the Dark Lord. And you and Weasley saved Greg from the fire. So thanks. And for letting me revise with you for NEWTs." He runs out of breath and stands there looking at her as if he's expecting to hear the tally of points.

"_Nothing makes me sicker than the thought that I owe you anything." That's what he said before. And now he's acknowledging the debt. Might actually be sincere. _

She nods. "You're welcome." He's still looking at her. She folds her arms over her chest. "Malfoy, I've done my reading, and life debts are payable in only one currency. So wait until my life needs saving."

He smirks. "Only the brave deserve the fair."

She rolls her eyes. "Presumably I'm the brave one, then? Because based on what you've said in past, I wouldn't be the raving beauty in this couple."

The smirk has actually turned into a smile, a small hopeful one. "You like the way I look. You said so." He quotes back to her, "All ice and moonlight."

She feels her face burn, remembering the way he was moving under her hands when she said that, how satisfying it had been to apply everything she'd learned from her solo games with Polyjuice, to watch him squirm and moan when she touched him just so, while she called him a twitchy little ferret. Applied research. Lust and power.

He adds, "And you liked my clothes. So I put on my very best ones." He looks at her significantly and adds in a lascivious whisper, "With nothing under them. As is traditional."

He is actually trying to entice her. And the attempt itself is very enticing, all by itself. To what end, she wonders, and reflexively closes her grip on her wand.

He sees that movement and flinches, then stretches out both hands, palm up, to show her that he's unarmed.

She narrows her eyes. "So what's it about? Blackmail? Because that would be really stupid, Malfoy. They'd say I only defended your parents because I was sleeping with you." He flushes pink at that last phrase and shakes his head.

That actually makes her giggle, because she'd thought he was shameless. And the idea of being enticed is really too much for her.

"As long as it's honest lust," she says. "But I'm not marrying you, so don't even think about it."

***

His room is ice cold. She looks at the fire, which has gone out, and wonders why he hasn't re-started it, or at least cast a warming charm. Then she looks at his wand on the mantelpiece and sees the layer of dust on it. He hasn't been carrying it. For him, it would be no more than a prop. He still can't do magic, and when she asks him about the fire, he shows her the burns on his hands.

He's incompetent to lay a fire the ordinary way, for all of Neville's lessons.

She suppresses a sigh and says she'll have to change clothes first. In her blue dress robes with the garland of blue beads in her hair, she feels very much like an actress who's come off stage into the dressing room.

She returns wearing her jeans and warm shirt and (for good measure and defiance) her Weasley jumper with the 'H' on it. Not that she's a member of the family any more, but she'll see what he has to say about that item. One rude word, and she considers herself released from any agreement.

He doesn't say anything, but sits on the bed between the parted curtains, looking haughty, which she translates as tense and miserable. She debates between making the fire with magic (quicker) but opts for the ordinary way, which might be pedagogically useful. Also, it will spare his pride somewhat, though that's low on her list of priorities.

She lays the fire slowly and carefully, so that he can watch, then finds the cigarette lighter on the mantelpiece and lights the kindling with it. Last of all, she takes each of his hands in turn and heals the burns on them. She waves her wand under the canopy of the bed and casts a warming charm. "It will take the fire a while to catch up," she says. "And meanwhile…"

***

They do what they did before, with kisses and roving hands, but this time, without words and with eyes closed. The body in her arms is actually rather nice to hold, if still a bit thin. And it feels familiar; she's been on the other side of that skin more than once, and she knows its responses from the inside. With her eyes closed, she doesn't know the color of the fine silky hair that keeps flopping over and tickling her nose, and the stretches of hot smooth skin under her hands don't add up to a picture that she recognizes.

Rather than keep the clothes by way of costume or setting, they carefully have set them aside. At the end, they're lying side by side, sated and sleepy and half-wrapped in the discarded clothes.

He falls asleep first, lying on his back among the luxurious folds of his formal robes. She looks at him in the dim light and thinks of Dean's watercolor studies: he's all pale skin and feather-fine hair against the dark fabric, his body slim and light. Hollow bones like a bird, she thinks, and oddly fragile, with his long fingers and toes.

She's weary but over-stimulated, and the darkness presses on her eyes. Seven hours or more to daylight, she thinks. She should get up and go down the hall to her own room.

That's her last thought before the dream. She's back in the drawing room at the Manor, only things have shifted weirdly. It's Tonks who sits next to Narcissa, looking on with wide-eyed terror. The perspective is warped somehow; the chandelier hangs much closer than she remembers it, the crystal lustres brushing her face. Ron is shouting her name. She can hear his agonized voice over her own screaming, and then it changes shape and pitch to turn into the sobbing of an abandoned child.

She doesn't remember this dream.

She wakes in darkness, disoriented. She's lying on her side. Her first impression is that she has a lap full of warm squirmy child. Soft flyaway hair is tickling her face, and next to her someone is in fact crying, shuddering and choking with it. He's curled into the curve of her body and each tremor shakes her as well, and it's much too loud to allow her to fall asleep again.

She waits for it to die down. It doesn't.

She can't tell if he's awake or asleep, until there's a pause and she hears a very wet sniffle. She whispers, "Nightmare?"

He jerks away from her. "My fucking _life_ is a nightmare. I'm not going to wake up from it though. Except in Azkaban." He sits up abruptly.

"It's the middle of the night."

"How _perceptive_ of you." He's wiping his eyes. "I haven't slept a full night since… I can't remember."

She puts her hand out in the darkness and strokes his back.

"Granger, are you trying to _soothe_ me?"

She takes a breath and tries not to be exasperated. "Yes, I suppose so." It's like dealing with a fussy, spoiled child, which she supposes is exactly what he is.

"Neville does it better." He nestles backward, drawing her arms around him. "Like that." As if he were playing one parent off against another_. _

***

She wakes again in the darkness, with her arms still around him. He's snoring softly, twitching in his sleep. It's chilly in the room and she desperately wants a hot bath. She thinks about the bed at her parents' house, or just down the hall in her own room, in which she can sleep happily alone. How nice it would be to disentangle herself from this situation which has gone from questionable to outright bizarre, and take herself home, back to the world she knew before—the world in which there are normal people so-called, and in which she did not just come through a war.

Except the only people she knows there are her parents, and they're half the world away and don't remember her.

She rolls over, reaches for her clothes with her free hand, finds her wand, and casts another warming charm. That's something of an improvement. She extracts the arm that's under him. He mumbles something in his sleep and turns to take her in his arms, nuzzling against her neck. From collarbone to knees, she feels the shock of hot silky skin against hers.

_He actually has quite a nice personality when he's asleep_, she thinks, and lets her arms close around him.

She drops a kiss on his forehead, and closes her eyes against the thought: _my enemy, whose file I have been reading_. Thinks instead: _He has nightmares and he's afraid of waking up in Azkaban. _

That leads to the next thoughts, the ones that have been bothering her all along.

_What kind of society condemns an eighteen-year-old to living death ending in madness? _

_And how much choice did he ever have?_ She's been wrestling for the last months over the depositions concerning his assignment to assassinate Dumbledore, and she sees no turning at which he could have reasonably changed course. Not without considerable help from the outside, and that was not offered in time.

Only he nearly killed two other people in the process, and he cast Imperius…

And she's thinking all this _while in bed with him_.

She has no hope of being objective at this point, not when she's taken the liberty of borrowing his nervous system and catching his nightmares. Not to mention what she's just done…

She remembers that Boudicca Derwent has made inspection tours of Azkaban, and resolves that she is going to be on the next one. First thing Monday morning, she's going to talk to her about it. She is not going to hear any more loose talk about Azkaban without knowing exactly what that means.

***

They wake once more, this time in a serious embrace, hot and silky and murmurous, like a sexy dream, only real. (So this is the _amour fou_ Fleur was talking about, she thinks.) She remembers the vile purple potion, but nonetheless reaches for her wand to cast one or two of the charms Fleur taught her. Who knows what the time-turner does to one's reproductive cycles. And there's the other kind of protection to mind, as well. Then she asks him how far he's willing to go.

"If you're asking what I think you're asking," he says, and there's a long pause, "I think there's something you should know." She smiles, unseen in the darkness, to say: go on. "I don't… I mean I haven't…"

"You mean…"

"I mean that you're inquiring at the sign of the unicorn, Granger."

She tries not to laugh out loud, and succeeds. Instead, she says, "Only if you want to." The irresponsible teenage girl in her head is squealing, _Oh my god I would never have guessed that Draco Malfoy was a virgin. Here's to the post-war, indeed_.

And that's the last moment in which she thinks about with whom she's celebrating the post-war, before she sets herself to concentrating on the details.

***

The next morning, up early as if nothing happened, they walk out to the Quidditch pitch to fly drills for two hours before she's distracted by the thought of the programming work waiting for her at her parents' house.

There's just a moment when they're walking off the pitch carrying their brooms, when he touches her elbow, very lightly, and half-turns to her. _Like a flower to the sun_, she thinks. His face is full of light, and she understands that he expects—wants—to kiss her. Except they're in full daylight, there are people around, they're both too well-known, and officially this isn't happening. He understands her arresting gesture before she's half aware she's made it.

***

When she does finally turn to him, it's out of sight, in the narrow hallway outside her little cubbyhole of a room, and his kiss is desperate and ravenous—not to mention hot and soft and wet. It doesn't match her picture of him at all (arctic chill, ground glass and razor blades).

It's with great difficulty that she extricates herself, reminding him of their assignation in two weeks. The one they discussed, in some detail, in the dark of the night. The last one, she decides, before she gives this up for good. But she's not telling him that, not until she plays one last set of Polyjuice games—this time with a partner.

She goes into her room to pick up what she needs for the weekend, retraces her steps to the entrance hall and walks out from the castle into the midmorning sun, down the path to the towering gates with their winged boars. The Aurors nod to her and the gates swing open to let her pass. She Apparates just outside the barrier.

***


	33. Chapter 33

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Halloween and the day after: the same day too many times.

You check in with McGonagall about the time-turner and then go to dinner with Neville and god-help-us Malfoy. At the (former?) Slytherin table no less, Malfoy giving you his best prince-in-exile sneer and the rest of them staring at you for Eating With The Enemy. Neville's decision. Not sure what prompted it. He's an apprentice; you're an occasional visitor. You don't fit into protocol but there's no call to look for trouble.

You go to the Ministry ball because there's no way out of it. Neville leaves with his Gran before you have a chance to talk with him.

The same day, too many times.

Home at last the next morning, Apparating at noon from just outside the Hogwarts gates into the downstairs foyer. (Anyone else who tries that will have a nasty surprise.) You hope the crack is muffled, or sounds enough like an engine backfiring to fool any neighbors who may have heard. Through the last set of defenses, up the stairs, into bed. Turn back twelve hours—how many turns? Eight hours of sleep, four hours to work. As if you hadn't spent the night in embraces and uneasy sleep and conversations that feel even more unreal than dream.

Dawn flares dull and colorless over the repeating rooftops.

Six hours of programming, finish the last snippet of code, notes for QA. Take a walk.

"Aren't you the Grangers' daughter? Home from uni?"

"No, I'm working in the City."

"And your parents? Charming people."

"They're abroad just now."

Ring up Dean—the Tate this time or the National Portrait Gallery?

Molly's book of housekeeping spells comes in handy. Solo you could prep a four-course feast for fifteen people. It's like having your own sous-chef. Strange to hear the clack-clack-clack of the chopping knives in your parents' empty kitchen rather than in the fertile chaos of the Burrow. Nothing is as it was; Molly has a different face now and your "friends forever" never see you anymore.

But for the last time, no regrets.

The same day, too many times. Turn back the hours to seize two hours of daylight.

Zip up the anorak. Apparate to the Scottish coast, raw and rugged. Steel spray under lashes of cloud. Skim the wavetops on your borrowed broom, whooping, hair plastered back, madly flirting with hypothermia. Just like the dream, less the lover. Adrenalin scours you clean. Apparate home, hot shower, towel off, dress for work—formal robes.

The same day, too many times. Turn back the hours—how many turns? An afternoon at the Ministry, poring over Gringotts records. There's a hole in the bucket. There's a hole at the heart of the world. Hogwarts is bleeding to death from the inside, hemorrhaging galleons and sickles and knuts. There are no wizarding orphanages. What's going to happen to the seven classes of students who learned torture in detention last year? Seven classes, seven years is a third of a generation. You have an idea of what makes a monster. Down one Tom Riddle, this last May. How many in the queue behind? Home by darkness—the wartime curfew's still in effect, only this time it's the werewolves and the rogue Dementors.

The same day, too many times. Turn back the hours—how many turns? Forgot to Floo Neville at his grandmother's. Ask him how he's doing. He found a nest of Venomous Tentacula in the formal gardens. Fine specimens of the northern variety. Saved them to transplant to the Hogwarts greenhouses tomorrow afternoon.

Basically harmless, he says. You have to know how to talk to it.

You chuckle at Neville's idea of "basically harmless." He has affectionate relationships with ferocious magical plants.

Of course you don't tell him about Malfoy. You're not going to tell _anyone_ about that. It's a lapse—a lapse you intend to repeat. A bargain.

The same day, too many times. Sleep this time, without benefit of time-turner. You have Sunday ahead of you. Your sleep is dark and mercifully dreamless, but lasts only four hours. Rise in the grey pre-dawn, get the knives chopping for an omelet with _herbes fines_. Remember the Sorcerer's Apprentice, cartoon brooms multiplying. Breakfast, toast, strong tea (Lapsong Soochong for the winter drawing in, woodsmoke and caffeine). You feel more intelligent in the morning. Ready to QA some code. Bang through it—ten hours gone in test cases. Evening draws in early—winter coming.

A chill in the room; you wrap your mother's woolen shawl around you and remember the apprentices' corridor. You don't cast warming charms at home. Magical kitchen prep but no warming charms, and what magic you do, you keep well out of the range of the electronics.

You remember pale skin and heavy dark robes and you feel a pang of lust. You're not doing that again; it was an impulse. Bad judgment. He's in your files, for Merlin's sake. What was that fabric? Something heavy with a silky sheen and a magisterial drape, that feels splendid as you slide your hands under it. Your mouth against his clavicle so you can feel the pulse at his throat. Delicate, breakable, much too young. Almost a year younger than you: only eighteen this June and you're nineteen. Strange to learn your lover's birthday from his war crimes file. No, not a lover. An impulse.

Woolen shawl over your shoulders, finely woven. Anniversary present from your father to your mother. Not quite as heavy as Neville's cloak, but just as warm and reliable. Winter coming on in England is the onset of spring in Australia; night here is daylight there.

The same day, too many times. A month of Sundays. It's tempting, that trinket on its glistening chain. A month of Sundays. Turn it back to late afternoon, Apparate to the Hogwarts gates to see if Neville's in the greenhouses. He's transplanting the new specimens. He gently restrains the insidiously curling tendrils while digging the plants into their new pots. His hands are much larger than yours, square, with blunt tips and dirt under the short nails. His shaggy hair curls over the neck of his robes, held back in an onyx and silver clasp that looks familiar. He reminds you that Gran has invited you for a visit, in a week or two.

The same day. Night of the same day. Sleep this time. Sleep this time and the dream permutes again, shattering shards of chandelier; the dark voice, strong arm, silver knife of your torturer descend again.

***

After Thursday night visiting hours at St. Mungo's, Hermione sleeps the night at her parents' house. She drops her things by the bedside, strips off her clothes and throws them over a chair—not at all her usual procedure—before she slips under the covers of the bed in which she slept as a child, and slides into dreamless darkness.

She wakes the next morning to an owl tapping on the windowpane. No, she doesn't recognize it… and it looks at her reproachfully when she fails to produce an owl treat, because it never occurred to her to keep them on hand in her parents' house.

She unrolls the message with its unfamiliar yellow-and-black seal with the monogram JFF… _Meeting seven o'clock tonight at Shell Cottage, regrets for the late notice. Justin._ Yes. She remembers their conversation at the Halloween ball, and thinks Justin must have quite as busy as she, these last weeks. She rubs sleep out of her eyes, thinking about the succession of frustrating meetings the day before, and fury surges anew thinking about the Sentient Magical Creatures Committee. They successfully distracted her for two months doing research that's going to come to precisely nothing, or at very most, a report that will gather dust on a shelf somewhere in the bowels of the Ministry.

No, she corrects herself. No research is ever wasted. It just may not get applied where you think it will.

Good timing, this, she thinks as she scribbles her reply at the bottom of Justin's message: _I'll be there. Hope you are well. HJG. _She doesn't have a personal seal with which to re-close the message, so she conjures something in red and gold; he'll know who's sent it when he sees the Gryffindor colors.

***

She Apparates to Shell Cottage and is immediately grateful for her heavy winter cloak, as the wind from the sea lashes her hair and dampens her face. Fleur meets her at the barrier and sees her inside. Hermione is intrigued to notice that the Veela glow is stronger than she's ever seen it, and when she tells Fleur that she's looking well, she's rewarded with an incandescent smile and the official news of the pregnancy. The name's already chosen, Fleur says: Victor if it's a boy, and Victoire if it's a girl—for the little one will be born in early May, near enough to the anniversary of the battle, and she always liked both names, not least for her childhood friend Viktor.

Hermione bites her lip, thinking of that lapsed correspondence. A year of war, and then her virtual engagement to Ron, and Ron's jealousy…

"Do you hear from him?" she asks.

"From time to time… he's quite busy, you know, but he does ask after you." Fleur smiles. "You made quite an impression, I think. He'll be here for the trials." Hermione nods. It seems so far away, the fifteenth of March, the more since in her timeline it's more like ten months to a year, given that she's living three lives now.

Inside, it's less a meeting than an indoor picnic, with a splendid assortment of treats: tea and hot chocolate, three kinds of cake and a sumptuous plate of delicacies with a savor of curry, and traditional bread-and-butter and cucumber sandwiches. Justin is sitting in a chair by the fire, and he rises to greet her when she comes in. The woman seated next to him, wearing sensible but impeccably tailored tweeds and sturdy walking shoes, can be none other than his mother. Hermione immediately feels self-conscious about her wind-whipped hair and wonders if her clothes are quite right, the same ensemble she wore to the Decommissioning. Of course, it goes without saying that her accent is wrong. Funny that Justin's mother should intimidate her more than Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy.

When Justin shakes hands with her, she feels the knotted network of scars on the back of his right hand. He smiles and thanks her for coming in spite of the short notice; it's been quite a task lately choosing a night when everyone was available.

Justin says, "I should fill you in before we start. We're quite a bit more official than we were when I spoke with you at the Ministry ball." He smiles at Andromeda Tonks, sitting on the low footstool next to him, "Thanks to Madam Tonks, we're now the Remus Lupin Foundation." Andromeda nods to Hermione in acknowledgment, and perhaps it's the glow of firelight on her weary but smiling face, or the expression, but Hermione doesn't startle at the Black family resemblance—or rather, she doesn't immediately see a resurrected Bellatrix. "And my mother is most dedicated to the cause."

Mrs. Finch-Fletchley nods, and Hermione thinks it's not just her hope that reads approval as their eyes meet.

The introductions go around the straggling half-circle that rings the Shell Cottage hearth. There's Mrs. Finch-Fletchley, the president of the Foundation; Justin, the corresponding secretary and treasurer; Andromeda the honorary president, Bill Weasley the Ministry liaison, Lavender Brown the St. Mungo's liaison (she adds, since she's there so much anyway), and Padma Patil the archivist.

"And the rest of us are foot soldiers," quips Seamus, who's lounging on the floor looking as un-military as possible, in corduroys and a fisherman's sweater, as Parvati sits on the divan, smiling at him and handing him down the plate of tea cakes.

Hermione freezes; next to Parvati is Lavender Brown (as expected, as they're apparently still the Gryffindor inseparables), but sitting next to Lavender is none other than Ron Weasley, the last person she thought she'd see here. Fleur puts a gentle hand on her arm, leans in and whispers, "Ron is our unofficial liaison with the Auror Department."

Clearly, some things have changed quite radically while she was otherwise occupied.

***

After everyone has served themselves food and had a first cup of tea or chocolate, the meeting comes to order. Justin has prepared a copy of Arthur Weasley's report on the extrajudicial reprisals against Greyback's werewolf packs for Hermione's review, along with a folder of press clippings from the _Prophet._ He introduces her and says that they're particularly interested in hearing about the Committee on the Status of Sentient Magical Creatures.

Hermione tries not to let the bitterness come through, as she says, "Well, I'm coming to the conclusion that it's another gesture that's meant to come to nothing. On the bright side, I'm getting fairly well-grounded in the literature on sentient magical creatures." She reviews the committee's record over the last months, and more importantly, lists the membership.

Bill groans aloud. "The usual suspects," he says. "Three of those are Umbridge protégés."

Hermione smiles, mordantly she's sure. "That's what I suspected. They made it quite clear on day one that neither werewolves nor Dementors were on the agenda. 'We're not here to discuss Dark Creatures,' was how they put it."

Justin says that they're not putting a lot of faith in the Ministry, and to be quite clear, the Remus Lupin Foundation is funded entirely from outside the Ministry and Diagon Alley.

"Don't put too fine a point on it," Andromeda says. "It's entirely Muggle-funded." Hermione smiles in spite of herself. So she's not the only border-crosser; she'd never have anticipated this development.

Nor would she have anticipated the next report, which is from Lavender Brown, the St. Mungo's liaison. She's been in meetings with Derwent and Smethwyck, and she's reporting on the draft protocol for werewolf capture and rehabilitation, with the recommendations for production of Wolfsbane Potion per the notebooks of the late professor Snape. Lavender also mentions that there are some refinements that aren't in the notebooks but were mentioned in the NEWTs Potion revision group by one of Snape's students. With a grant from the Foundation's president, the Potions group at St. Mungo's has independently verified those changes to the process, since the original source was not of confirmed reliability.

What a polite way to put it, Hermione thinks, rather than baldly saying that they didn't trust Draco Malfoy as far as they could throw him, without magical assistance, into a gale-force wind.

And there's to be a new wing of St. Mungo's: the Lupin-Snape-Finch-Fletchley Center for Clinical Management of Lycanthropy and Lycanthropoid Disorders, funded entirely by Finch-Fletchley family money. The foreshortening of death makes those two, Lupin and Snape, seem not so absurd a juxtaposition.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger (undated, early to mid November)**

Late, very late, and I cannot sleep for thinking about that meeting at Shell Cottage.

It's the first time that my contemporaries here have ever listened, _with interest,_ to what I've turned up in my research. I cast my nets wide, of course, and when the Committee on the Status of Sentient Magical creatures decided, in its infinite wisdom, that werewolves and Dementors were not on the agenda, I decided that they would be on _my_ agenda.

The Dementors have been a tough nut to crack; they're apparently Most Secret and the literature is very, very thin. The werewolves are a different affair, and I had much to report.

I have not been idle; I am now reasonably well-read on house-elf legislation—going back to Roman times, in fact—as well as the reservation policies governing centaurs and merpeople, and the treaties with the Goblins, which bid fair to play a role in the upcoming war crimes trials. I outlined for them the war damages for Gringotts, incurred in the search for the late Dark Lord's seven Horcruxes…

They even listened, patiently, to my aside about the plural of Horcux, not an issue much addressed in the literature. _Secrets of the Darkest Art_ has 'Horcruxes' whereas the _Codex Maleficarum_ in the 1763 Rosier-Malfoy translation has 'Horcruces.' (The 1910 Hopkirk-Fudge edition elides entirely the whole issue of the Horcrux, singular or plural.) One is well advised to have Latin, in reading these texts, for translation in the wizarding world is even more a matter of choice and discretion than in ours.

(At the back of my mind, a persistent voice asks me if I read correctly the texts by which I steered in doing the memory modification on my parents. That voice is with me always now, drawing near and then fading out, like a distant radio station.)

I told them, aloud, what I am: a bond-slave of the Goblins until the debt is paid. After all, every researcher should make disclosures of possible conflict of interest.

I said aloud what I've only been thinking: "They're sending me off to do research to keep me occupied. I think they're hoping to run me into the ground." Yet oddly enough, that gave me courage, and I added, "But no research is ever wasted. There will be a report—and then there will be the unofficial first draft, with chapters on the things you _do_ want to know about. No research is wasted, and I always cast my nets wide."

I have already written the first draft, which is _not_ the report that the Committee assigned me, but it's all library research so there's no question of official secrets. A copy will be finding its way to the appropriate hands; Arthur Weasley is already on the distribution list, and I understand that Bill Weasley will be conveying its essence to his employers at Gringotts.

I've found some very interesting things in the Durmstrang library, and Viktor's cousin has been most helpful. He directed me to a collection of oral histories of the Grindelwald War, as well as the Continental Healers' literature on werewolf rehabilitation. Voldemort's plan for the werewolf packs imitated Grindelwald's campaign of terror in Scandinavia. Not coincidentally, that region now leads the wizarding world in werewolf rehabilitation. Once the embargo is lifted, our Healers and Aurors might have useful conversations with theirs. In particular, Snape's improvements to the Wolfsbane Potion will be quite useful to them, and they will be able to help us with refining our rehabilitation regime.

And then there's Lavender and Ron. Tonight, I felt guilty for every bad thought I ever had about Lavender Brown.

She remained seated to give her report on the new protocol at St. Mungo's. She walks with a cane, now, a quite beautiful staff decorated with silver and lapis. Her face, disfigured by those puckered tracks that I still think of as dueling scars, has a terrible beauty: her eyes are bright and very old. Ron watches her with an expression that's equal parts solicitude and respect, a look that brings out his resemblance to Percy and to Bill.

Beginning on New Year's Eve, which is a full moon night, the Foundation will have representatives on call, in pairs. She and Ron are on the first rotation, Bill and Justin on the second; thereafter, the roster has yet to be determined. They will monitor adherence to the St. Mungo's protocol, and will advise any survivors of werewolf bite about the Foundation's support services. (Thus far, there have been no survivors.)

Mrs. Finch-Fletchley pointed out the elephant in the parlor.

_What are we to do if there's a non-fatal attack on __the Muggle__ side of the border? _

They all stared at each other, and since no one else was volunteering, I told her that St. Mungo's policy is to Obliviate Muggle casualties.

Mrs. Finch-Fletchley nodded, and said in her clipped, posh tones that she knew what _Obliviate_ was, and it seemed fairly useless from a clinical standpoint. "It's hard enough to manage a chronic condition without the patient literally not remembering that they have it." (No doubt she's served on boards of medical charities in our world.) "And then there's the difficulty of keeping them compliant with the medication regime."

I told her that I agreed, that they'd have to dispense with _Obliviate_ for the rehabilitation regime with Wolfsbane to work, but that the Aurors were rather free with that particular spell.

Ron chimed in: "The old hands say that what the Muggles don't remember won't hurt them—or us."

Without great hopes, I asked, "So I don't know the Aurors' policy on Muggle werewolves. I don't suppose you looked that up…"

"There isn't such a thing. I've already looked." He clarified, "No such thing as a policy and no such thing as a Muggle werewolf—not in Britain, anyway. Not in living memory."

My less-responsible part wanted to ask, "Who are you, and what have you done with Ron Weasley?" Instead I said, "I don't think we can assume that state of affairs will last forever."

Bill stopped taking notes long enough to say, "Point well taken. Except that's the case nobody wants."

_He was taking notes. I'm not only being heard, but they're taking notes. _

"Best to be prepared for it, then, or the fools will steal a march on us." The Statute of Secrecy won't have long to live, once there's a Muggle casualty of werewolf bites. Fleur's face went dead white, and Ron's hand closed on Lavender's. I told them to put me on their list permanently; the more heads available to sort this mess, the better.

***

I remember every one of my encounters with the Dementors. They terrify me, as they're meant to do, and I dread the next encounter, for which I have less than a month and a half to wait.

I've talked to Derwent about her inspection tours of Azkaban. She goes once or twice a month; the earliest practicable time for me to join her would be mid-to-late December: a lovely prelude to Christmas, that holiday whose traditional warmth is all the greater for glowing in cold and darkness. I think of the Dementors and I remember Sirius Black's narrow escape, and then Dolores Umbridge, protected from their hideous cold by her smug feline Patronus.

I think about Draco Malfoy, who dreads them more than anyone I know, because he is shortly to be in their company forever.

Halloween in the dark of the night, _after_, he talked, rather a lot. I've heard his voice for seven years now, from little-boy soprano through cracking, squeaking adolescence to the light, elegant voice of a young man, its enunciation always clipped, precise, patrician. But now, it was as if someone else spoke with that voice; the sneering tone was gone, and the speaker only human.

He said, "You're on the war crimes commission. So you've seen my name."

That is no secret, so I said nothing.

"If my parents break house arrest, I go to Azkaban. If we all play nice and we go to trial, I'm probably going to Azkaban anyway. For life."

After a long silence, he said, "I've been making lists of all the things I'll miss. Flying and sunlight and sweets and Quidditch." A little awkwardly, "And sex. Or at least being touched."

He took a deep breath. "I'm storing up good things against the night. Even though I know they'll take it all away in the end."

He laughed at the bargain I proposed, and called it perverse (saying that only a Muggle-born would contemplate such a thing)—and then promptly accepted it. It was oddly comforting when once more he sounded like the sneering little aristocrat.

I don't mistake his alacrity for love, or even lust; it's terror of the void, and it's nothing personal.

***

They say that ritual is comforting. The time-turner allows me that, and I take it.

Thursday nights after work I go to St. Mungo's visiting hours with Neville. We don't talk about why; I would be hard pressed to explain. He accepts it as a gesture of solidarity. I know that I will continue, as long as I'm in the wizarding world. It's something in the nature of Remembrance Day, and actually does some good for the casualties in question. We sit in the room with his parents for an hour or two, making conversation; it matters not about what, for it's the tone of voice that soothes them. I know that it's also in the nature of rehearsal for the worst-case scenario with my parents.

I see Dean and Luna at the Tate; we wander among the flaring glories of late Turner and talk of race and blood, except when Dean's little sisters accompany us. Dean tells me, sotto voce, that Ginny and Harry have been fighting ever since Halloween night about whether she'll go to St. Mungo's for treatment. Thus far it's a standoff.

Percy and I meet for lunch near King's Cross, and compare notes on demographic analyses. It does not look good, and no one else is particularly interested in the figures. The Purebloods in the Ministry who displaced the Muggle-borns thinks it's good riddance to bad rubbish; they're at ease _among their own,_ with no outsiders to question the whys and wherefores of what they do. I wonder aloud how the Ministry has managed not to collapse under its own incompetence; Percy has no answer to this.

There is NEWTs revision, which is a grown-up version of our old Hogwarts classes, less the endless sniping. Everyone is more hard-edged and serious, even (or should I say especially) Malfoy, whose thin sharp face has a near-prayerful attention that makes him look like a choirboy or a Renaissance angel. It's one of his last wishes, he told me, to sit the NEWTs.

Flying lessons, during which I lose myself, as far as I can, in something at which I never will truly excel. I will never fly as well as Harry or Ginny or Draco. I know that my best will never be that good, but the effort is pleasurable nonetheless.

Patronus Charm drill with the Hogsmeade villagers, and more trainings, further afield. I watch Neville and follow his example. I never will be as good a teacher as he, but nonetheless I do my best: it's a matter of life and death.

I have not had an episode of wild magic since my confrontation with Neville in October; that's months ago, in my timeline. I told Derwent that the dark glamour of destruction isn't just a foible of Purebloods; the Muggles rhapsodize about their bombs and guns. We're only another kind of human, this side of the border.

Crookshanks still sleeps in Neville's rooms.

***

**Author's note:** Thanks to all of my reviewers—anonymous and signed—for extensive comments on the foregoing chapters. Posting is late this week due to illness, but should be back on schedule for all stories, starting Wednesday.


	34. Chapter 34

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Author's note:** Dear readers, with some trepidation (and a small delay) I give you the longest chapter yet, for the reason that I could not find the right place in which to cut it.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**(undated – early to mid November)**

Thursday afternoon. Derwent had to cancel our meeting as she had an emergency consultation at St. Mungo's. She told me to go home and rest. Well, that's useless. I have two hours before I meet Neville for Thursday night visiting hours. What could I do with two hours? Not sure at all. I had prepared myself for that meeting… and now that it's not happening, I feel an odd weightlessness, as if I were stepping out onto void.

I am so inured to the routine of one set of work abutting the other, like bricks in the wall.

_Another brick in the wall_. No, we won't think about that… For some reason, my mother liked that grim song: _We don't need no education / We don't need no thought control._ I remember her humming it under her breath while she chopped garlic and onion, preparing Sunday dinner. Provencal cookery and Pink Floyd: my mother was nothing if not eclectic.

No, it's not good to be thinking about her in past tense.

But she did know the difference between education and thought control, she and my father both. Which is why I so particularly hated Dolores Umbridge, but that's another story.

And tomorrow night I leave for another weekend at Longbottom House, which already makes me uneasy. Perhaps I should go home, turn back the time-turner, and steal a few hours' sleep in my parents' bedroom; one of my earlier selves is already using mine…

***

As it happened, I didn't end up going home at all. I was sitting in the waiting area outside Spell Damage, deciding what to do… deciding on paper as I've come to do, because my odd life here means that a good part of the time, my only (or best) companion is this notebook. So much of my work happens in the hours between…

I was writing here when someone spoke my name, a familiar voice but unexpected, because out of context. I looked up. Lavender Brown was standing before me, leaning on her silver and lapis cane and looking at me with an odd expression… lips quirked… and then I realized that it was an artifact of the scars, that tug her mouth into something that looks a bit like a lopsided smirk but isn't.

"I didn't expect to see you here," she said. "Are you busy?"

I shook my head, because I had expected to be busy, but suddenly I wasn't. I told her that I was working for Derwent but she had been called away, and I'd been dismissed for the day… which didn't help much, because I had to be back in two hours.

She said that there was something for that, since she'd been wanting to talk to me privately, and had I had lunch?

I shook my head. I never have lunch, unless it's in the other world. I simply busy myself through the lunch hour and think about dinner at Hogwarts, on the evenings that I find myself back there. That earns me a reputation as a hard worker, but the fact is that the attention to work takes my mind off how hungry I'm getting; the mid-afternoon tea and biscuits don't even touch it.

Lavender told me that we could repair to the Leaky, where she had a tab. We took the lift downstairs and stepped through the public Floo; Lavender nodded to Hannah Abbot, who saw us to a booth.

I think it was the very one in which I sat with Harry and Andromeda and Teddy… how many months ago? It's November now, so that was only a month ago, in the world's time.

Lavender told me to order what I liked.

I wasn't sure what she was about, but I thought I'd just be frank about it. "I don't have any money," I said. "Not in this world. The goblins take everything."

She nodded. "I know. You said so at the meeting." So she understood what that meant, then, bond-slave to Gringotts.

I wanted to tell her point-blank that I didn't want to take charity, but she didn't give me a chance. "Order what you like," she said, "and don't worry about it." She said, "I owe you a life debt, after all." I frowned. "From the Battle of Hogwarts," she said. "I'm sorry I was remiss, but I didn't find out until recently."

I shook my head. I have only the faintest recollection of the battle, or rather, I only remember it in lightning-struck fragments: firing off hexes and jinxes in all directions, taking each assailant as they came; they're all shadowy, with the only thing in focus the ferocious smile on the face of Bellatrix Lestrange as she held off all three of us: me, Luna, and Ginny. Oddly, I felt no fear; all I remember is my desire to be the one to bring her down. I wondered once more if Neville were telling me the truth about not caring that he was not the one to kill her. We all had a claim, of course, but it still seems that his claim was of more ancient date than mine or even Molly's. And then the Room of Requirement, with the Fiendfyre beasts roaring about us, and I have that one in stereo because I lived it once as myself and a second time in the Pensieve (and in my own nightmares) as Draco Malfoy.

As well, I remember what everyone remembers: the moment when we thought that all was lost, when Hagrid came out of the forest at the head of a parade of Death Eaters, bearing what we thought was Harry's corpse…

"You brought down Fenrir Greyback," she said. I shook my head, no, it had been Neville and Ron who did that at the last, at least so they tell me.

"You stopped him taking my face," she said, "and whatever else he planned on taking before he killed me." She leaned forward and said, "I didn't think I was going to survive the battle, you know. I almost didn't."

How much has changed in two years: there would have been a time that the thought of harm befalling this girl would have filled me with vindictive joy. A child's vengeance: "I wish you were dead," which I'll not even think ever again, now that I know what it means. I remember Draco saying that to me back in second year when the Basilisk was loose, and realizing, even then, that he had no idea what he was saying. I'd grown up at the beginning of that year; he remained a child, having no reason to grow up.

She said, "I know there's not much chance I'll be able to pay it back in kind, but if there's ever anything you need…"

Unexpectedly my eyes filled with tears. I wasn't going to cry in front of this girl, not because she was Ron's girlfriend, but because she was a free citizen of the world that had turned me into a slave and saw nothing wrong with that.

She looked at me, and I wasn't sure what to say.

She told me about the weeks after the battle in which she had lain in that bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. It was a twilight world between life and death, and she had not known which side of the line she would be on when she woke. She didn't find out about her Order of Merlin until her mother brought her the decoration, and the newspaper, four weeks after the battle.

They had not let her have a mirror, even after she was conscious, which made her very much afraid.

The day they did bring the mirror, Bill Weasley had come to visit her. Bill and Fleur had been among the first visitors outside her family, and then she had learned that Justin was down the hall, so they'd taken to visiting, such as that was possible, during their rehabilitation appointments. Justin's mother stayed by him as well, and that's how the Shell Cottage veteran's group had been born.

Neville would visit, once they had crossed paths up in Spell Damage, because it hadn't been much trouble for him to add one more stop on his rounds.

"You make him sound like one of the Healers," I said.

Lavender smiled her odd lopsided smile. "You know, when we were little, that's what I thought he would be. I still think he wouldn't be bad at it. He knows all the routines here. He was able to tell me which days the food was best, and when the cleaners come through…"

I sat quiet, because it occurred to me once more that all of these people, my Pureblood schoolmates, know each other from the cradle. She confirmed that in the next words.

"Mother says it's a good thing you're doing at Hogwarts," she said. I frowned. "That you're looking after Draco Malfoy," she said. "Ron told me that he was giving you flying lessons… as a favor to Neville. "I don't know if I'd want to have that much to do with him."

I couldn't resist. "I thought you and Parvati thought he was _fanciable_."

Lavender laughed, almost but not really her old giggle. "Oh, that was fourth year," she said, "and we only meant if he kept quiet. As soon as he'd talk there was no hope."

Yes, she'd realized what a horrible little git he was, not quite right away because of courses he reserved the worst of it for Muggle-borns, but fifth year was what decided it for her, his thoroughly nasty performance on the Inquisitorial Squad. Fat lot of good that did him, in the end, because his father ended up in Azkaban. Sixth year, of course… Her voice trails off.

"Sixth year we were all rather horrible," I said. I thought about the Quidditch tryout and how I fixed it in Ron's favor and I think about how I was bad enough when it was reasons of state and this wasn't even that, just trying to do favors for the boy I fancied…

Lavender said, "I did a lot of thinking, you know, when I was lying in that bed. I knew there was something wrong with my face and I could tell my whole body was wrong. I knew I'd never be the same person again and I didn't even know who that girl was that I'd be… and before I even found out it was you that saved me, I'd already figured out that you saved the lot of us. And I'd laughed at you for being a swot and a grind. Parvati told me that you outfitted the whole expedition; she'd heard it from Neville who had it from Dean who heard it from Ron."

The chain of gossip rather dizzied me. Never breathe a word of anything to anyone or the Gryffindor grapevine would have it all over wizarding Britain by the next morning…

Anyway, she meant me to know that she felt bad about what had happened, sixth year especially, and …. She didn't say anything, but I knew she meant Ron.

I said, "It's not a problem about Ron. I don't know if he told you, but it was me that broke it off."

She nodded.

"So how have you been doing since Hogwarts?" she asked, and I knew that she meant "Hogwarts, Battle of."

I said, "About the same as anyone. There's life, and there's work to do, and there's everyone that's missing."

She nodded.

I said, "How was it at Hogwarts? No one talks about that part. I asked Neville, and he changed the subject."

She says, "It was horrible all around. I don't wonder he doesn't want to talk about it. He took the worst of it, you know. The Carrows used to talk about his parents in the Dark Arts class, said that blood traitors would all be reduced to that state, that is if they let them live at all. In the new improved state of things, you know, after the Dark Lord won."

"Which I'm very glad he didn't," I said.

"Me too," she said, and I flinched for a minute because the thought had come unbidden into my mind: _What did you have to worry about? You are a Pureblood. You would have had a choice._ I knew it was both insane and unjust; Lavender had fought on the same side I had, and paid a higher price. And it wasn't true that she "had a choice," at least now; there's no "across the border" for her. She's stuck here.

It's a sickness, I know, to dwell on blood status, not least because it's pernicious nonsense. But there's a part of me that looks at Lavender and knows that there's a _rightness_ to her and Ron together, because they're of the same tribe, the one to which I don't belong.

She told me that Crabbe and Goyle had been bad, but Crabbe was very much the worse of the two. He was very free with details about his father's Death Eater raids, and he told more than one student things about the last moments of their family members… what they had said or done under torture…

… and he laid hands on her more than once, which she still doesn't like to think about. It doesn't do her credit, she said, but she felt no horror at all when she learned that he had turned loose the Fiendfyre and been consumed by it—only a cold relief that she would never see him again.

I thought, but didn't say, that I feel much the same way about Bellatrix. I touched that scar on my neck, the one that only I know is there.

She said that they were always talking about the glories of being a Pureblood, but for the girls that was to mean being prime breeding stock. Those were the words, too, and she really didn't want to hear them ever again. What Pureblood had meant before was only that they'd all grown up together and gone to the same children's balls and Quidditch matches at Hogwarts and hide-and-seek in the maze at the formal gardens of Malfoy Manor.

I had to remember that there was a time that the family hadn't been war criminals but high society, the natural choice to host large galas for the amorphous group of _our kind._

She said, "I saw Madam Rosmerta the last time I was up in Spell Damage, and she said that I was to thank you _particularly,_ and that you should stop in to the Three Broomsticks. She didn't get a chance to see you the last you were there."

"How is she doing?"

"Better, she says. None of us will ever be what we were, but better."

***

Friday night, she has finished the work at the Ministry, which as usual has run late. Thank god for the time-turner, she thinks, without which she'd never be on time to anything. The only difficulty is avoiding making time loops that cross each other, and the only really private locked room is her parents' house. She's long since lost track of how many times she's glimpsed herself crossing through on her way one place or another, and she is thankful that the clock in the hallway has a calendar function, or she might overfill the foyer with too many copies of herself on her way one place or another.

It's Friday, and her next stop is Hogwarts. She goes back up to street level, finds a convenient dark place (it's long past nine o'clock on a November night) that lacks a surveillance camera, and Apparates home, drops the defenses, turns back five or six hours to make curfew, and Apparates to the gates of Hogwarts.

She hikes up to the castle and meets Neville outside his rooms. He's been studying; behind him, his books are open on the desk and the NEWTs revision schedule is very much in evidence.

"Do you have your things for the weekend?" he asks. She pats the pocket of her robe and smiles. With the life she's leading lately, she isn't even sure where she's going to sleep any given night—or rather, any multiple of any given night—so she has most of her possessions, clothes and toiletries and books and tools, in the little beaded bag at any given time.

He smiles in return, and for the eighteenth time she wonders what's in that smile. Neville never seemed that mysterious when he was the sad little boy she was comforting all those years back, but now there's a layer of fathomless darkness behind nearly every gesture. It's all of the things that happened last year, which he only rarely alludes to (as if she were the real hero) and her many encounters with his disapproval.

"Gran will be glad to see you," he says. "She's been looking forward to it." He adds, "Every time I talked to her by Floo this week she's mentioned you."

Odd, because Hermione has been feeling the same way. She's been looking forward to this weekend visit, as if she were meeting someone new and intriguing, another face of the redoubtable elder witch she already knows. Some of that is realizing that Neville's Gran is someone else entirely—formidable she knew Mrs. Longbottom was, and certainly fascinating, in those fireside chats—but now there's another face: a possible mentor. She's been intrigued by the art and science of magical defenses ever since she saw those Pensieve memories of the Engineering Consultant pacing out the perimeters of Malfoy Manor and Spinner's End, and to know now that this formidable witch was actually Neville's Gran…

Well, she remembers back to OWLs year that Neville had mentioned just in passing that Madam Marchbanks was a family friend, which apparently trumped anything the Malfoys could bring to bear, if she had read aright the expression on Draco's face then. The fireside tete-a-tete with Gran back in August was worth more than a few History of Magic lectures, and now she wonders if she and Percy Weasley have ever spoken, because there seems to be a congruence of interests in their discussion of ideas crossing the border. For one thing, she remembers that Neville recognized the volume on history of wizarding technology and that Gran had assumed that she owned that—and Ron had specifically said it was Percy who'd selected it.

She's been wondering quite a bit lately just who is who in the wizarding world. To hear Draco, you would have thought that the Malfoys were the social dernier cri, but she's beginning to doubt that. If they were so sure of their position, wouldn't their son have had a bit more self-possession? It reminds her of Nigel Black, who seems to come from old money but has an unmistakable edge of arriviste pushiness; certainly he wouldn't have been trying to impress her that way if he really were all he'd like her to believe he was.

Odd how she free-associates from Draco to Nigel.

Which doesn't mean she's about to schedule anything with Nigel. It's bad enough that she's agreed to what she has with Draco—well, that's a bargain, an _arrangement_, and the key point is that Draco is not anything resembling a colleague. Oh yes, and he knows what she is, which Nigel does not. Very odd, even to think that of Draco: _we're the same kind_.

"Hermione," Neville says, gently touching her shoulder. She startles. "Penny for your thoughts?" He smiles and then says, "Or a knut."

"Well, I'd have the penny," she says ruefully.

"You were somewhere else," he says.

"Oh, sorry," she says. "Work, and one thing or another." She throws on her cloak. "Will your Gran be wanting a midnight broom ride again?"

Neville shakes his head. "I don't think so, or at least she didn't mention it."

Nonetheless, as they step into her room, she takes the Nimbus 2001 from the corner and brings it with her. A little business might be haply supplemented with a ride, if need be, even if she'd be paying for that later with a lecture from Draco about mistreating his broom.

***

When they step through the Floo into Gran's kitchen, the shadowy house elf is already waiting to usher them into the formal dining room, where a feast is laid out. Gran eyes her shrewdly and greets her, "Looks as if you've been working long hours, lass, and our Neville hasn't fed you up as he should." She doesn't have to turn around to know that Neville is embarrassed by the proprietary tone.

Gran's eyes are sharp indeed, for Hermione has just finished a twelve- or thirteen-hour work day, and as she sits down (Neville helping her off with her cloak and then attending to her chair) the food smells absolutely ambrosial. She hasn't eaten—or eaten much—in that time.

"Neville's not responsible," she says. "It's my own fault. I get absorbed in the work and I forget to eat." Gran smiles.

"Then it will be young Boudicca who's neglecting you," she says. Hermione is amused by how nearly everyone is "young" to Gran, and wonders if behind her back, she refers to the Headmistress as "young Minerva."

"No, Healer Derwent puts out tea and biscuits when we meet," she says. "Very nice biscuits." She remembers, somewhat ruefully, that after morning tea, there was a succession of the usual horrible Friday design review meetings—in between which she sandwiched a like succession of such meetings at her Muggle job—and that today's lunch was two chocolate frogs that she'd found in her blue beaded bag, and she can't even remember who gave them to her. They might even date from the expedition last year. It was a sad day when the wizarding world discovered software design meetings, and she can't blame anyone but herself for that.

The soup is quite sumptuous, and she's trying not to bolt it, because it's hot as well, and she doesn't want to scald her mouth. Neville is looking at her across the table, his own spoon poised in midair, with a look of affectionate amusement. He said, "I think I might have been as hungry as you after the battle. I don't think I've ever tasted anything so good as that breakfast."

"You would be right," Gran says. "I do remember that. If I recall, I washed mine down with butterbeer." She smiles the bird-of-prey smile, and adds, "Rosmerta was quite generous with her provisions. I don't generally believe in firewhiskey before noon, but for the end of Tom Riddle, it was worth making an exception…"

While Hermione makes short work of the soup, Gran talks about the Battle of Hogwarts. She'd forgotten—oh yes—that Gran was one of the last people into Hogwarts in the first wave. She remembers her striding off, wand out and long green dress and black cloak snapping behind her, to join the fray. She's talking about the Lestrange brothers and the change in characteristic Slytherin House dueling technique between her day and theirs, as well as the bravura of young Molly Prewett. Molly Weasley, Hermione corrects mentally. If only the wizarding world weren't patrilineal—well, at least the parts she knows—it wouldn't be so very difficult to keep track.

The one thing that can be said about Gran is that she's endlessly surprising.

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety." But that was Cleopatra. Of course, if Cleopatra had made it to old age, she might have been quite as fascinating as Gran… and conversely, Gran might have been a fascinator of the other kind, in her youth.

***

In a reversal of old-fashioned manners, it's Neville who quietly withdraws after dinner, leaving Gran and Hermione to take a bracing walk on the terrace. Hermione is glad for her winter cloak, as well as for the discreet warming charm she casts before stepping out into the windy November night.

Gran says, "You held up rather well," which Hermione doesn't understand, until she adds, "Young Boudicca did tell me what happened to you there, and I understand she didn't approve of you being there for the Decommissioning. But you didn't miss a thing."

Hermione says, "There were parts that were done outside."

"I mean that you were taking notes. I know the look, my lass; you don't miss a trick. And I hear that you've been interested in magical defenses for some time."

Hermione looks her in the eye and lifts her chin. "It would seem a natural interest for me to have, given my circumstances."

"Miss Clearwater told me that you put yourself on the distribution list for the Decommissioning Report, and returned it to her two days later with comments. Rather _extensive_ comments." Hermione is taken aback once more at just how much Gran knows. "I imagine you'd fancy an opportunity to try out the bits you've been picking up…" She hopes that Gran isn't a Legilimens, because that's exactly what she has been doing. Has done, _rather extensively, _in her parents' house, to her own entire satisfaction.

"Healer Derwent told me you hadn't taken an apprentice in forty years," she says. "I gather that wasn't for lack of wartime conditions."

"No, more that I had my hands full with other matters," Gran says. "And most wizarding folk are keen to do it their own way, so there's not a lot of call for that sort of work. More it's an antiquarian hobby; it's not every day they Decommission something like Malfoy Manor, or set up something of the like. If Necromancy weren't universally banned, I'd be tempted to have a go at it just to chat with the Malfoys' defense architect. On the other hand, it does appear times are changing. And you've the right sort of mind."

"What sort of mind is that?"

"The sort that worries about all of the contingencies," she says. "The sort who's been having chats with young Weasley about the Statute of Secrecy, and taking an interest in the history they don't teach at Hogwarts…"

"You know Percy Weasley?" Apparently, Gran knows as well some of the matter of their conversations, which would imply that Percy Weasley knows _her._

"Foremost expert on cauldron specifications, and that's not the least of his charms," Gran says, and Hermione has a weird shiver at the notion that Gran might mean that Percy is _fanciable, _though on second thought she can't help agreeing that there is something very attractive about a wizard who gets his details right—and knows so very many of them. "Very sharp lad, young Weasley, and ambitious, but discreet when conditions require. Some say he might have done better to have been Sorted into Slytherin or Ravenclaw." She smiles. "Though it does help the House of the Lion with that reputation for dunderhead courage to have one or two such in a generation. You'd be another."

"Professor Slughorn hinted I ought to have been a Slytherin."

"Oh, Horace would say that. But I'll be the first to admit the House of the Snake isn't what it was in our day. It was much jollier then—all the Houses were. But then we weren't at war when I was in school." She smiles with fond reminisce. "Now I could tell you some stories about Horace Slughorn, but I don't think he'd approve." The smile has shifted from aquiline to mischievous. "Perhaps after you're done with NEWTs."

Hermione can't suppress a giggle at the thought that Neville's Gran has the drop on the Potions Master, and at the notion of _young_ Horace Slughorn… which is almost as inconceivable as that of _young_ Albus Dumbledore. Even in the Pensieve, she's only seen them middle-aged.

Gran says, "The other point in your favor, my lass, is that you know the other side of the border."

She tries to keep the bitterness out of her tone. "I didn't know that being Muggle-born was any sort of advantage."

Gran looks at her with an appraising glance. "There's a great deal to be said for Muggle-born. They don't take things for granted." She makes a wry face. "None of my Muggle-born schoolmates failed the Charms OWL. There's nothing like having to work your way through Charms in your thirties, thinking all the while if you hadn't been so _careless…_"

She remembers that Gran had called Charms a _soft option _for Neville_,_ and McGonagall had made it known to him that she'd failed her OWL in that subject.

"I had some time to think during the late war," Gran says, and Hermione wonders if she means her time as a fugitive, or while she was waiting for the inevitable.

She continues, "Muggle-born's nothing much, if you ask Tom Riddle or Lucius Malfoy, I'll grant, or that Umbridge creature, but I don't recall that lot having much in the way of qualifications in _our_ line. None of them could troubleshoot the Floo to save their lives. No, we wouldn't have the present Floo Network, if it hadn't been for the Muggleborns. Purebloods, left to their own devices… I wouldn't like to think."

"Percy told me it was Sophonisba Chattox who did the modernization, and she was a Pureblood."

"Ah yes, but her _staff_—Muggleborns, every witch and wizard of them. She had the Ministry connections, and they had the ideas. The Muggle world's where the new things were happening, and some of them went to university after Hogwarts."

"So there are witches and wizards who go to university? I thought there weren't any wizarding universities."

"No, but there are Muggle universities." Hermione can't suppress an upsurge of hope—might she have it all, after all?—and Gran plainly sees the expression, lit by the glow through the French doors. "You might be a likely candidate, and our Neville, if he so decided, would be another. There's work to be made up, but our kind live a long time."

Hermione is quite sure that it wouldn't be dignified for a witch of nineteen years to skip up and down the terrace in glee, but that's exactly the urge that she has to suppress with an iron effort of will.

"Neville tells me you've done a fine job organizing your friends for NEWTs revision," she adds. "Now after you've finished the NEWTs, we should have another talk. That is, if you're interested."

"I'm interested," Hermione says, trying to sound properly worldly and calm.

"Then we'll speak about this again after you get the NEWTs results," Gran says. "That would be March, I believe."

"When the trials begin," Hermione says.

"Ah yes," says Gran. "The ides of March, I do believe. Only, I should think, rather more propitious for you." Hermione says nothing, thinking about the prospects of settling the debt with the Goblins. It's looking less and less likely, given the bad faith of the Ministry.

Quite unexpectedly, Gran continues, "I understand you're under obligation to Gringotts."

"Where did you hear that?" It's an impertinent question, likely.

Gran looks at her shrewdly. "I understand you put it in the open at Shell Cottage."

Hermione says, "And I told Neville, and he told you."

"Not until I asked him. He warned you about the Goblins."

She quotes back, "_Some of the bits were still twitching when they buried them. _Yes, he warned me."

Gran's answering smile is grim. "They've a long memory, and they've been cheated more than once." Hermione thinks that's rather an understatement, given what she remembers of History of Magic, and what she's learned since. Ron was altogether too casual about cheating Griphook, and that in spite of Bill's warnings.

She says, "They're not expecting justice from us, so they'll take the cash and let the credit go. And no one seems particularly interested in their grievances just now."

She glances at the sky, and adds, "It's rather late, and I think our Neville would fancy one of his walks with you tomorrow. We'll talk about this when you return tomorrow."

***

It's cold, and nonetheless they have been walking for an hour now. It's not only the brooding weather, the lead ceiling of grey sky, that weighs on them; there's a burden of unspoken words that Hermione can feel as if each of them were carrying a sixty-pound pack. It isn't a light-hearted walk as it was in June, but a trudging trek overland. There's what she hasn't said, and equally on the other side there's what Neville hasn't said.

What she hasn't said. Facts suppressed. Next weekend, she has an assignation—there's no other word for it—an appointment set for the express purpose of having sex, with someone who's agreed to take Polyjuice and impersonate her dead crush. In return, she will do the same and impersonate someone—whose identity she does not know yet—with whom her partner in perversity would like to lose his virginity in the same-sex division.

She snogged Ginny Weasley and learned, somewhat to her surprise, that the same-sex thing doesn't fuss her particularly, but the Polyjuice-masquerade, pseudo-necromantic, sex-change thing with an old enemy seems to add unwarranted layers of perversity. And it's not love, mind you, just sex. It makes her skin creep the tiniest bit for a number of reasons. On Draco's side, it's very much a last request. He seems so much younger than he really is, and he's already nine months younger than she is. She knows for a fact that he's done appalling things. He's her hereditary racial enemy, or she's his, which comes to the same thing. Oh yes, and he's on her docket at work as a likely war crimes defendant. Conflict of interest on top of perversity. On the other hand, nobody at the Ministry told her she wasn't allowed to have sex with people who turned up in the files.

It's not infidelity, even if it feels like it. There's no understanding between her and Neville. He's never said anything, nor has she. They're friends, certainly closer friends than they were a year ago. There's the occasional moment of frightening mutual attraction—or at least she assumes it's mutual—but they've never talked about that, nor said what it means.

On Neville's side, well, she just learned that Neville accepted a rather expensive gift from Draco—the black and silver hair clasp—which, it turns out, is an heirloom from the fourteenth century. For his birthday. That's what Neville told her when she admired it this morning, while remarking that it looked vaguely familiar. It is in fact the very one that Draco was wearing when they sheared off his hair. And he gave it to Neville quite casually, one day in early August, saying that it was only fair since Neville had observed his birthday that he return the courtesy, and (so as not to be uncharacteristically sweet, she supposed) he was tired of looking at Neville tying his hair back with a rag, and if he was going to wear it in traditional style he should do it properly.

She remembers that Neville's gift to Draco had been a box of sweets from Honeydukes, which was no more than Neville had done for the "other children," as he put it. And Draco demonstrated for her Neville's technique in dealing with his nightmares, which would be a little less alarming if Draco were nine or ten rather than eighteen, and if she hadn't seen herself how quickly his childish snuggling moved to outright seduction.

She's been jealous all along; it's just she hadn't admitted to herself that it was sexual jealousy.

***

Two hours out. She's been over this ground again and again, the dog-run in her head paced by the hounds of jealousy. What can she say? She has no right to ask questions without giving answers in turn, and she's not sure she's ready to say aloud what she's about, even to the most neutral possible audience, and Neville is far from that.

She walks, and as she walks, she stares at the sky, the ground, the line where they meet. Who is this walking alongside her?

A friend. What did Boudicca Derwent say, "Do Dark Lords keep friends about who disagree with them?" Well, no. Dark Lords, mad kings, dictators: none of them have friends. Cohorts, advisers, minions, consorts, but not friends. A friend will argue with you, and stand their ground when they think you're wrong—stand their ground, for your own sake.

Neville disagreed with her about the memory charms. Repeatedly. And he's right.

And he asked her, in all simplicity, if a crime against property didn't weigh less than a crime against persons. Yes, she supposes she could have solved her problems with a discreet transfer of funds. It's just it runs against her middle-class upbringing. Isn't she in debt slavery to a bank in this world, and aren't the bankers creatures of the underworld? Goblins in this world, and in the other world, creatures who would look much worse than goblins if you could see their souls. She thinks about Nigel Black's bragging about money, and his contempt for those who have none, and why she can't feel the least sorry for turning him down: well, no more than she feels sorry about the whining of a spoiled child who can't have the toy he wants. Nigel isn't hurt, but disappointed, by her refusal, and if she accepted, she would be nothing more than a possession.

Neville put his hand on her forearm, in the pub back in October, to tell her that she really shouldn't have any more to drink. Because she had been reaching for a fourth round, and she shudders now to think what she would have done with four firewhiskeys inside her when her natural limit is one and a half, two on the extreme outside. What she did on three was bad enough.

He repaired her broken nose at the picnic, and regardless of whatever it may have meant on his side, it was enormously comforting to be held when she was feeling betrayed on all sides.

And he walks with her, and understands that they belong to the tribe of the walkers, and that to be earthbound is not necessarily a handicap. The horizon changes shape, very slowly, as they walk, but it doesn't move. The earth and sky always meet in the same place. That reassures her. It makes sense, at this time of year and under this grey sky, to think about what will outlive her, and it's comforting to think that the landscape will exist after she's gone, as will general truths, which is why she's always liked general truths. The theorem of Pythagoras was true three thousand years ago in China and it's true this afternoon in Lancashire and will be true in ten thousand years under another sun. It lightens her mood to think about that, the same way it eases her mind in the dentist's chair to do Latin declensions in her head.

***

At the third hour, Neville turns to her and asks her if she's feeling all right.

"I'm just thinking," she said.

He smiles and says that's nothing new, but he's been a little worried because she's been frowning for the last half hour, as if something's seriously distressing her. She's a little alarmed by the thought he's been observing her; she'd assumed he was looking at the horizon, too, or the plants by the wayside.

She says she's feeling more than a little disturbed by the war crimes commission and the extent to which they're avoiding the involvement of the Ministry, and at how many eager hands Voldemort found to do his work once it became official policy. It was true that Dolores Umbridge had been pushing the Pureblood agenda for years if not decades, but she wasn't the only one. Nor was Lucius Malfoy the only well-connected Pureblood who went over to the Dark Lord. It appears now that his great sin was failing to turn up on the Ministry's payroll, because now the whole thing is on his head. Conveniently, expropriating him will solve the problem of how to pay for increased Auror staffing in the post-war, not to mention the refugee problem.

And the thing she wants Neville to know is that they are going to be putting her under Fidelius, very soon. In the next month, they're going to be running the queries leading up to the construction of the list of defendants, and at some point, she's not going to be able to talk about it. Literally. In particular, she has a powerful suspicion that there's going to be some very dirty business concerning Draco, and she wants Neville to know that. Because she knows that Neville talks to Draco, and she isn't going to be able to speak for herself once this is underway.

"Anything in particular?" Neville asks.

"No. I mean I don't know," she says. "Only that I can smell it on the wind. Derwent's on my side, I think, because she keeps dropping hints about it every time the question comes up, of who's getting nailed for what Unforgivable. I don't think she approves of what they're going to do, and she's building escape hatches."

Neville considers for a while. "So do you think Draco is going to Azkaban?"

"I don't know," she says. "He certainly thinks so, and he's acting accordingly. Last wishes and so on—I know he wants to sit the NEWTs."

"Draco was such a nasty piece of work when we were in school," Neville says.

"I know," she replies. "Sometimes I have to close my eyes and pretend I don't know who he is. Or at least that I don't remember what he did. And then there are times that I look at him and all I see is this scared child who had no idea what he was doing."

"Is he still turning up in your nightmares?"

Hermione stops and considers the horizon again. "Not so much," she says. "With all the Pensieve memories—you know, I review all of those—half the time now it's somebody else's nightmare I'm getting. And I have to remember that I got off easy, all things considered. I only had a bad half hour when I thought I was going to die." She says, "And Draco was a nasty piece of work, but altogether minor. He wasn't really very good at it, or we wouldn't have been able to walk straight over his face five years running."

Neville says, "He cast Unforgivables." Implacable. "He put Madam Rosmerta under Imperius." His voice trembles a little; Hermione suspects he still doesn't forgive himself for letting Draco walk into the Three Broomsticks with him, given how much it upset Madam Rosmerta.

They start walking again.

"Yes, and Imperius wasn't the only one," she says. Realizes she shouldn't have said that. Neville doesn't know that, not officially, and she only knows it because she reviewed Harry's memory in the Pensieve. The difficulty is that it's getting harder all the time to remember what she knows as herself and what she learned from someone else's memory. "Harry saw it. You know, when he was seeing through Voldemort's eyes."

"Not _Avada._"

"No. He rather spectacularly failed at that one." Not that casting Cruciatus is going to endear anyone to Neville, given his parents… She closes her eyes, realizing that this could very well read as trying to poison the well for her rival, who's also her lover—no, her dirty little secret very much on the side. She's already taken the step into the void by telling what she shouldn't, so she may as well be fair. "It was under duress, and I don't know if it was more than once or twice. Court politics would be my guess. Voldemort made him torture the Death Eaters who failed to catch us in London, and that's two birds with one stone: terrorize the underlings, and make sure that Draco will never have an independent following among the Death Eaters. Tom was very keen on divide and conquer."

Neville asks, "Do you feel sorry for him?"

"I could ask you the same. I'd say about half the time, and the other half I'm wondering if I'm being played for a fool. Or if I'm being unethical. The problem is that we're not really his jailers, but we're somehow in charge of him."

Neville nods and frowns. "He played the Azkaban card with me."

"Me too. The 'poor me, I'm doomed, I'm going to die a virgin, they won't let me sit my NEWTs' card." Oh Merlin, she can't believe she just said that, and in a passable imitation of the infamous Malfoy drawl. "I have to keep reminding myself that I actually have some principles—one or two—and I was in favor of basic human rights before I'd ever heard of Draco Malfoy."

Neville laughs at her impression. "That's not bad. You sound almost like him."

"I'm surrounded by prats who talk like that. He's not the only one. All terribly entitled little boys from over-privileged backgrounds. And it's dreadful of me, but he can't do anything nice without me suspecting him of bribery."

"If he _is_ bribing you, I'd say you're getting good value at least."

Hermione turns away to look at the far horizon, her face aflame as she remembers the _good value_ she got Halloween night, and the following morning as well, before the flying lesson. She manages, "What do you mean?"

"Your flying has definitely improved. Gran said you showed well when she put you through your paces back in August."

Hermione turns to look at him with an outraged half-laugh. "_Put me through my paces? _What am I, a horse she's thinking to buy?"

It's Neville's turn to blush. "Erm," he says. She looks at him. He adds, "Eh."

"Very articulate you are, Longbottom," she says, bursting into laughter. "And I nearly wrecked Malfoy's very expensive broom trying to keep up, so I suppose I'm pleased that I passed the test." She adds flirtatiously, "So, did I get full points?"

"Oh, you've always had full points with Gran," Neville says, and blushes again as he adds, "And with me."

Oh. She stops, and he stops, and she looks at him. Standing this close, she has to look _up_—he's a big, broad-shouldered man—and nonetheless he's shuffling his feet, acutely embarrassed at what he just let slip. She's not sure if it was some kind of declaration, but from his reaction she suspects so.

Before she's thought about what she's doing, she has her hands in his hair, and she's ruffling it—and it feels good, warm and soft—and tugging on it to bring his face down toward hers. His skin smells of fresh air and soap.

She loses her nerve at the last moment and gives him a chaste close-mouthed kiss on the cheek. His face is hot and she thinks, _if he's blushing when I do this, what would he have done if I'd kissed him on the mouth? _

She says, "And you have full points with me." She closes her eyes and whispers, "Neville." She doesn't know what else to add besides his name, what else she can say without feeling indecent.

He puts his hands on her shoulders and gives them a squeeze she can feel through all of the weatherproof layers. For a moment, she thinks he's going to pull her into an embrace. Then he says, "Hermione." She can hear him relishing the syllables, as if he's getting to say something he's never been permitted before. "You're worth twelve of… anybody else on the planet." He closes his eyes, and she can feel him trembling for a moment, and then he lets her go, reluctantly it seems.

She realizes she still has her hands in his hair, and it's looking rather ruffled. She's still fighting the urge to muss it even further.

"I've made rather a mess of your hair, sorry," she says, withdrawing her hands. She notices that she's being very careful to hold on to the hairs she's inevitably pulled loose. She knows where she's going to file those at the next available stop.

"No problem," he says, though his voice doesn't sound quite steady. He reaches up and undoes the clasp, shakes his hair back to finger-comb it into order, then puts the clasp back in place.

Very fanciable, this rumpled, clumsy fellow who blushes easily. She only wishes those were _her _fingers doing that. She's standing on a slight rise on the wild moors, in a November wind, trying to remember how to speak English while trying not to let Neville see just how shaken she is. Almost nothing happened, and she's feeling simultaneously weak-kneed and ferocious with lust.

***

They make their traditional stop at the pub on the return trip, though now the light is fading. She watches Neville when he goes to the bar to get their pints, and her eyes are different, or rather what's different is how she's using them. He's left his heavy jacket and jumper in the booth, so he's standing at the bar in his long-sleeved shirt and jeans. Her eyes are looking for the lines of his body through the clothes.

Yes, she's perving on Neville, wondering what the skin under those clothes looks like. She looks at the back of his neck, and imagines it continuing under the collar of his shirt.

_Not a drop of alcohol in my system and I'm already thinking unacceptable thoughts. _

She recognizes the barman; he's the same one who served them back in June. The one who said something to Neville about his young lady, provoking another of those blushes. He's looking her way, and then saying something to Neville, who smiles shyly and nods.

He slides into the booth, and if it's not just her imagination, sits a little closer than customary. They don't talk about what happened; actually, they talk about the NEWTs study group, and what they're going to be doing over the Christmas holidays. Neville wants her to know that she already has an invitation for Boxing Day. From Gran and from him, he clarifies. Neither of them is prepared to subject her to the full rigors of a Longbottom family Christmas. (_Just yet,_ she swears he almost added.)

Then, oddly enough, they talk about Draco again, as if he were a difficult child of whom they had joint custody. Hermione mentions that he's interested in seeing London on the other side of the Leaky Cauldron, and she wonders if this might be arranged through McGonagall.

"You mean _Muggle_ London?" Neville says with an air of faint incredulity. "Young master _Toujours Pur_ wants to see Muggle London?"

"Presumably so he can see what it is they've been anathemizing over his head all these years," she says. "Better late than never, I suppose. I think it is in more of the last-request line, actually." She laughs. "Though central London at rush hour is not what I'd choose as a memory to cherish in Azkaban, myself. Or maybe I'm just jaded." She adds, "Or maybe he's expecting something a lot naughtier."

Neville laughs too. "Oh, I expect it will give him a thorough case of culture shock," he says. "You have to remember that he really hasn't seen anything outside of the Manor, Diagon Alley, and Hogwarts. A glimpse of King's Cross, on the way to Platform Nine and Three Quarters. That's it. Very sheltered upbringing. Maybe a peek at the Ministry with his loving papa. He's never been outside of the wizarding world." He takes a sip of his pint, and considers. "I think the sheer _numbers_ of us will put him in shock."

"So you're counting us as Muggles," Hermione jokes.

"We pass rather well," Neville says. He lowers his voice. "No one in this pub even thinks to suspect. I've been coming here for years with my friends, and I pass for _perfectly ordinary_." He drops his voice to a whisper and leans in closer. "I know you think about it sometimes, crossing over and not coming back."

She looks him right in the eyes. "Every day, Neville. Lately, two or three times a day. And I'm not the only one." She remembers the conversation she had with Dean. "But our children would out us." And then she blushes, realizing what she just implied, and tries to salvage it with a joke. "And I'm in debt slavery to Gringotts, so my first-born child would be forfeit in any case."

"Only until the trials," he says, perfectly serious. "I asked Gran about that. She says the Ministry will be sorting that out with Gringotts." _He's been discussing me with his Gran, _she thinks in shock. "Though seriously, I think I have to stay through the term of my apprenticeship. And Professor Sprout would be disappointed if I left after she'd gone to trouble." He takes another sip, frowning. "And the children do need me."

She drinks her pint slowly, considering what he's just said. She's joking about crossing over, and he's considering it as a serious proposition, and balancing it against the commitments he's already made, about which she knows he is quite serious. She's not sure what to make of it. And his status and hers aren't remotely equal, because she has no idea what she's doing for work after the trials; Derwent indicates they'll likely conclude some time in April or May. _ No doubt, in time to celebrate the victory over Ultimate Evil on the second of May,_ she thinks. _What a cynic I've become._

"You're thinking about the War Crimes Commission again," he says, in a low voice meant for her alone.

"Oh, sorry." She looks at him. "You aren't by chance a Legilimens?"

"No, but you have that _very characteristic_ expression on your face again," he says. "Equal parts puzzlement and distaste."

"Due a low estimate of human nature coupled with unwarranted hope for better," she says. She lifts her glass, already feeling the potent ale. "To the essential rottenness of human nature—wizard or Muggle." Pauses for a moment. "And to your beautiful eyes."

***

"Erm," he said. And then, "Eh." And blushed all over his face and neck, which simultaneously strikes her as hilarious and the sexiest thing she's ever seen. Her brain keeps replaying this scene, not to mention the feel of his hair between her fingers, against the background of the dour and rolling moorland, with the leaden lid of sky threatening snow. Why is all this irretrievably gorgeous? Neville was always the clumsiest boy she knew, wizard or muggle, yet at the same time the most graceful—certainly in social situations, or anything to do with other people's feelings.

They sit at Gran's fireside and she looks at him, and thinks again what she thought in that pub: how his skin, flushed and golden now in the flaring light, continues inside his clothes. It occurs to her that she has filed away the means of finding out everything she'd like to know. At home in her Potions lab with one of those hairs and a tumbler of Polyjuice, she would be able to see exactly what he looks like without his clothes. The idea gives her a shiver and at the same time feels utterly wrong.

For all of that, she could reproduce what she did inadvertently with Draco: she could learn his reactions to touch.

She gets a flash of Draco writhing under her hands and cursing her for knowing just how to wring certain reactions out of him, almost against his will. Oh no, let's be clear. Quite against his will, and that's what made it exciting. She dislikes Draco, and reminding him of that fact while she rendered him helpless with pleasure was very arousing, in a twisted sort of way. He's sick, too, if he gets off on that, which he plainly did.

No, she's not about to play those games with Neville. Neville is real to her; there's someone on the other side of that skin, behind those eyes, someone whose feelings very much matter to her, and always have. She smiles tenderly, thinking about that, and is taken aback when she realizes that Neville is smiling back at her.

Draco, on the other hand, is a collection of nasty tics and even nastier actions. She remembers how he cast the leg-locker curse on Neville "just for practice," how he stole the Remembrall to leave it up a tree, how he talked about Neville's parents being in the locked ward, how he tried to get the hippogriff destroyed just because he hadn't paid attention to Hagrid's instructions about how to greet it. Yes, _that's_ why she hit him: he'd been gloating about how his father's influence made it virtually certain that Buckbeak was going to die, and therefore that Hermione's heroic efforts with the defense were going to avail nothing. Other people have never really existed for Draco, and she's not sure that they do, even now. Well, maybe his parents, for whom he was so terrified in sixth year, and for whose sake he was willing to sell Harry to Voldemort, even up to the very last. But other than that, he appears to live in a solipsistic fog, in which the shadows that drift by outside his little bubble of family and friends scarcely exist in any real way and can be dispatched at will to all sorts of dreadful fates.

Yes, and that's the person with whom she's scheduled not one but two assignations.

She's not going to think about that just now.

Gran is talking about the political situation with the Goblins; before dinner, while Neville was dressing upstairs, Gran extracted from her the full accounting, the numbers from that meeting with Bill Weasley back in June. She narrowed her eyes and said the figures were inflated, but as the bankers of first and last resort, the Goblins could set their own prices.

She told Hermione that she's paying the war reparations not only for what she and Harry and Ron did but for the rest of the wizarding world into the bargain. Not fair, but also not surprising.

Just now they're talking about the complete _lack_ of change in wizard-Goblin relations.

"There's no reason we can't return them the Sword of Gryffindor," Hermione says. "We really only need it in emergencies, anyway. And then it reverts to them. I don't know why that's a problem."

Gran smiles that dark, aquiline smile and says that it's pride, and precedence, and sheer bloody-mindedness—all Pureblood wizard characteristics of long standing. Then she asks if the little group at Shell Cottage has broached the subject of the Goblins.

Hermione reminds herself that she should _not_ be surprised at who's heard what from whom; the whole wizarding world gossips like a sewing circle. "No," she says, "not so far as I know, but I've only been to one meeting."

"Bill Weasley's in that group, isn't he?"

"By virtue of Borderline Lycanthropoid Disorder, not anything to do with Gringott's." The charter of the group is public knowledge, at least among the former Order of the Phoenix and its satellites. Gran says that it might be in _everyone's_ interest to add that item to the agenda.

As she talks politics with Gran, Neville smiles at her, just as in August. He sits across from her by the fireside, sipping his drink very slowly. The firelight dances on his skin, picks out the ruddy highlights in his hair, makes him glow as if from the inside. It makes her think of his skin, hot to the touch and smooth…

Neville, whom she wants, is out of her reach. If he's actually involved with Draco (not a very palatable thought, but one she can't keep out of her head), he probably doesn't fancy girls, and in any case she's not on his Gran's list. But if he doesn't fancy girls, whence all that blushing and stammering in her presence this afternoon?

Not that she's interested in getting married, but being on a list of the 'marriageable' really means being inside the circle where people are real. Being a quick disposable fling isn't what she had in mind—well, not being the sort of person who's good only for that. She wants to be taken seriously, and so close to the end of a race war she's not interested in having the exotic-other fling with anybody.

Well, except for Draco, but that's two carefully scheduled _isolated incidents._ It's not as if she's planning a relationship. It's just a bargain—very carefully time limited—not a relationship. God help her if she even thinks that word with respect to him, except to note that dislike is a sort of relationship. And she is dealing with him honorably: she's made it quite clear exactly what the arrangement is. It's not as if she's taking advantage.

Though she is coming to understand the stories she's read of men keeping mistresses. There's something that tickles her pride about having a little dirty secret salted away out of sight of anyone else. It's not the person who excites so much as the idea of the secret they represent. And she's not going to use the phrase _spoils of war,_ but he's been consciously invoking that: "Only the brave deserve the fair." Indeed. And he thinks no small potatoes of his own looks, for all that she can see the hatchet-faced forty-year-old he could become—well, a copy of his cold-eyed father.

She shivers. She does not want to think about Lucius Malfoy any more than she wants to think about Bellatrix Lestrange.

***

**Author's notes:**

"We don't want no education / we don't want no thought control." Roger Waters, "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2," from the Pink Floyd album of the same name.

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety." Shakespeare, _Antony and Cleopatra, _Act II, scene II; the lines are spoken by Enobarbus.

"…take the cash and let the credit go": Augusta is referring to the following lines from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, in the enormously popular translation (or paraphrase) by Edward FitzGerald: "Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, / Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!" As a child of the English nineteenth century, and a person of moderately cynical turn of mind, she is quite likely to have the whole of it by heart.


	35. Chapter 35

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

*******

Finally she's been getting around to that item on the list of things to do, Reform the Ministry, but it's still only library research.

"The committee's report should include full historical context."

"Any policy recommendations should be firmly based in the known literature."

"More research is needed."

Two months in, she knows for certain that it's a dead end; the committee is a cul-de-sac bubble in the organizational chart (if the Ministry for Magic is organized enough to have such a thing). She has learned an enormous amount about house-elves, centaurs and goblins, but no actual changes appear to be in the offing. If it weren't for the time-turner, she would miss half the meetings because they conflict either with the meetings at the bank or with the War Crimes Commission.

She's sitting in yet another War Crimes Commission meeting, grinding her teeth because they want another pass through the so-called Malfoy depositions to pick up yet another set of indices, which means going back through all of the Pensieve memories… And it's a misnomer; what they _should_ be calling them is the Pureblood Isolationist depositions. It's _not_ just the Malfoys, but emphasis seems to be on them and the families of the late seventh-year Slytherins. _Convenient,_ she thinks, _pick on extinct or decapitated pureblood lines and the disgraced power broker whose wealth you want to seize._ Not that Lucius Malfoy isn't thoroughly guilty—at a minimum, guilty of bribery and blackmail--but they're ignoring the Ministry. They're ignoring the structure that appeared overnight to carry out the campaign of repression and terror. Someone had all those measures in mind for years or it wouldn't have gone quite so smoothly.

Kingsley presides over the meeting, and his deep voice rolls over them. In spite of herself, she is reassured by him; she knows what he was doing during the war, and he's doing his best to hold the Ministry together. He didn't have any part in the Thicknesse Ministry, any more than Arthur Weasley did. It's the grayish little functionaries around the table whom she mistrusts. They've put Umbridge on house arrest pending the trials, but some of the faces around the table are her creatures: safe, quiet, equivocating little bureaucrats from acceptable Pureblood backgrounds. _What did you do in the war?_ she wants to ask them. _Where were you when they were 'registering' the Muggle-borns? Which side were you on? How many guesses do I get?_

Kingsley has said over and over that they can't take on the whole Ministry, and there's too much fuzziness with who was under Imperius and who was just obeying orders, willingly or not. Finally, the Ministry is just too big a piece of the wizarding world. _Half of the employed adults work for the Ministry doing damage control._

House-elves and centaurs and goblins are inherently magical species; humans are not. How many times has she read that fact in one form or another? It's only now that it settles on her. _It comes naturally to them, but we have to do damage control. We have to hide ourselves from the normal members of our kind. We can be eaten alive by our magic if we don't learn to control its flow. _She remembers the powers of heaven and earth flowing through her against her will, and the vortex taking shape over Ottery St. Catchpole. She remembers Luna and Mr. Weasley singing it back into vapor, and her own bone-deep weariness after.

Then she remembers Draco's voice saying: "Wildness, chaos—very Dark. Very pureblood." He had added, "That's what the old lines breed for." He's an idiot, or they all are, if that line about the breeding is true. The old pureblood families remember what magic was _before._ And in spite of all they know, they can't resist the lure of chaos and the dark. She remembers the feel of 12 Grimmauld Place before the Order cleaned it out, how that house fought back. Something ancient, inimical, inhuman resisted them every step of the way.

Dutifully she goes back to the scenes of torment, clipboard in hand.

She knows that this job is the worst possible work for someone with post-traumatic stress. She's walking through the Pensieve memories daily, picking out more details, hooking them into the big structure. She doesn't like the questions that are being asked. They're concentrating on particular victims, not the system that was created and sustained. Unfortunately, she's one of the high-profile victims, so she's been back through her own hideous recollections more than once. She doesn't _want_ to revisit her torture; her nightmares are doing a fine job of that.

The last time she walked through that scene—in three dimensions, in full color—she wanted to grab that knife from Bellatrix and cut her throat. No. Rephrase. She tried to grab the knife and her hand closed on that white wrist; memory-Bellatrix didn't flinch or otherwise react—of course not!—but under her fingers she could feel the tension in the hand that held that knife and she could feel the deadly intent.

She couldn't change the memory; it unfolded as it always did. And then she was screaming at the watchers, at Narcissa and Draco and Lucius: "You stinking cowards, you made this!" She was kicking them and pummeling them and of course they didn't react; how could they? They weren't real. Her fists and feet fetched up against something that felt like flesh, where those remembered bodies met empty space, but none of her blows had any effect. No hex or curse would satisfy this rage. She wanted to hear mechanical damage, the snap of breaking bone, screams to match the one that was being torn out of her.

She emerged from the Pensieve gasping like a drowning woman.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Thursday 19 November 1998**

I don't know why I even bother to date these; which Thursday 19 November do I mean, anyway? No matter how many times I loop the golden thread of my life line around this day, it is a wretched grey afternoon, followed by a more wretched evening darkening with snow… well, it depends upon whether you're in London or Hogsmeade. Likely it would not be a night for walking on the moors, either.

Neville told me that they have enough to do rescuing them in the summer season, those who haven't the proper respect for local weather, and that's not to mention the ones who get themselves into difficulties caving. He doesn't have to do with that, though, just drives the van, which frees up another person to go underground. (Spelunking doesn't appeal to him much, given his fear of heights and enclosed spaces.) He's had a driver license from age fifteen, thanks to a dash of Aging Potion and my skills for forging Muggle documents.

After his grandfather died, that was where he'd be, when he wasn't playing football (ineptly) with his friends from primary school: at the house of the eccentric who drove the rescue van for the local caving club. Gran's response to the loss of her husband of sixty years was to grow even flintier and more irascible, so at the age of eight or nine he wandered afield to find the warm presence that his grandfather had been.

One of the things that I'm starting to understand about Neville is his sheer indomitable _resilience._ Drop him, and he bounces.

Indeed. That was his rite of passage into magic, wasn't it? Being dropped from a great height, and against all expectations, bouncing.

And if he hadn't … ?

Well, that doesn't bear thinking about, and I see him _not thinking _about it at length. It's a useful skill for maintaining one's sanity, and all the more useful at the close of a war. We can look back and see all too many forks in the road whose other branch plunges into uttermost darkness. What happened in truth is bad enough, without traumatizing ourselves with the counterfactual.

Speaking of the counterfactual and the actual… or of the ghosts of the past, both the recent and the deeps of history, I had a letter this morning, with the seal of Durmstrang on it. Well, there was a letter and a package: more inter-library loan from the Durmstrang library, a Bulgarian tome in Latin from the eighteenth century that thus far has given me more information than any British literature on the Most Secret matter of the Dementors …

Actually, there were two letters, one nested inside the other. The first was from the Durmstrang librarian, Viktor's cousin, who has been most helpful in my researches. Wizarding Central Europe, _Grindelwald country_ as I call it, is a most interesting place, and their take on history is as far as possible from ours; I remember what Viktor said at Bill and Fleur's wedding about how he and his friend dealt with those who'd taken to scrawling "Grindelwald's sign" on their books…

The Central European response to Grindelwald has been to exercise every possible effort to make sure that he does not recur under any guise whatsoever: male or female, Pureblood, Half-blood, or Muggle-born, domestic or foreign.

Whereas we have pretended that Voldemort is a thing of the past… even when he was stalking abroad in his resurrected (or should I say partially Necromanced) form.

The Dementors, as it happens, are a feature of the British wizarding world that is far from admired abroad. Of course, Central Europe already has an indigenous vampire population of substantial size, not to mention giants and werewolves—it really is wild country, there—so that going to trouble to add one more source of terror was the furthest thing from their minds.

Whereas in our green and pleasant land, under-populated by the children of the night, the forces of order didn't have quite enough tools to deploy. Sometime around 1700, not long after the Statute of Secrecy, the Dementors put in an appearance. Whence, no one knows, of course; but from the distance of the Continent, there was extensive _speculation. _The natural history of the Dementor is not a subject on which the Ministry has published much; of course, I haven't had full access to the holdings of the Department of Mysteries, and what I learned at Hogwarts is that every library has a Restricted Section.

The care and feeding of Dementors, on the other hand… well, that subject has been much developed in British circles, though largely in practical terms and necessarily without much documentation. Even in magical circles, we are a nation of pragmatists.

The speculation in this volume from Durmstrang, by an anonymous writer of the eighteenth century, is that they are a conduit from _something_ to _nothing,_ or to put it plainly, the maw of the Dementor opens upon pure Void: perhaps the place where Vanished objects go, or some darker house of Annihilation. This writer compares them to bees in a hive, less the queen; which is to say in modern terms that they are a hive organism, aware of each other. They feed on _something_ and turn it to _nothing._ They do not appear to have emotions as we understand them, but they feed on our emotions and convert everything to icy void; in the extreme case, they eat souls.

And as we have lately learned, they reproduce asexually in a miasma of fear and despair.

I'm not sure if I'm thankful that this book is in Latin; the ancient language simultaneously puts the matter at a distance and makes me aware that I am cooperating, with each word that I translate, in creating the picture of horror that freezes my bones.

What's amply clear is that they are _not of this world_ and that they were summoned from some other realm. I'd long suspected that; they are not attested in British folklore prior to the Statute of Secrecy, unlike giants, dragons, elves, and so forth.

Let me repeat that, as the implication freezes me to the marrow: _they were called up by the Ministry for Magic. _Kingsley Shacklebolt knows the terms of their binding, and cannot speak of it. In terror of discovery by the Muggles, and the desire to enjoin secrecy upon our kind, the Ministry and the Wizengamot played out, rather after the fact, that of which the Muggles had long accused our kind: summoning demons.

And if demons they be, they are not of a kind attested in the _Demonologie_ of James the First. They are something new in the world. At the opening of the century that saw what we Muggles call the Enlightenment, the Ministry set loose darkness.

Let us not deceive ourselves. In that century, the Muggles were still burning people alive for witchcraft, heresy and so forth, and for all we decry Madame la Guillotine, she was a merciful alternative to being broken alive on the wheel…

I notice once more I've written "we Muggles"… and then "the Muggles"… is it "we" or "they"? What am I?

Only human.

No, it is decidedly "we." Humans, magical or not, are a savage species.

At the close of the letter, in flawless French, signed by Andrei Karkaroff, Head Librarian at Durmstrang Institute, there's a line about the letter enclosed within his: he hasn't a clear notion of the contents, because his cousin sealed it before sending.

I didn't need to know which cousin. I conjecture from the surname that Andrei the librarian is kin to the late Headmaster of the Institute, which means that Viktor Krum is as well… Repeat after me: _In the wizarding world, everyone is everyone else's cousin._

***

She's walking out of another meeting with the bankers, checking her watch, swinging the laptop bag over her shoulder. It's quarter of five and she's due to meet Neville outside the gates of Hogwarts in fifteen minutes. They're going down to London—the _other_ London—for his usual visit to the St. Mungo's closed ward, Thursday evening visiting hours. She didn't expect the meeting to run quite so late, and now she has to find a discreet place from which to Apparate to her parents' house and thence to Hogsmeade. Fifteen minutes isn't long to find such a place.

"And where are you going in such a hurry?" It's a drawling voice whose accent reminds her of films about country-house weekends before the Great War. You'd expect the owner of that voice to be standing in Edwardian sunshine in a Sargent portrait, flicking his riding crop.

Of course, when she's in a hurry, it has to be him. _Draco's long-lost Muggle cousin_. Nigel sodding Black.

"I'm meeting a friend," she says, not breaking stride. "And I'm already late." They've reached the lavish entrance and she pushes through the revolving door hoping to lose him.

He follows her. "A friend?" he asks. "One of an elite circle, I would think. I never see you with anyone." She doesn't even want to think about that. Is he following her around or is this just piffle?

"You see me at work," she says, walking faster. He keeps up with her and tries to take her arm. Her fingers twitch thinking about the wand in its sleeve holster. She'd _love_ to hex him, Statute of Secrecy be damned.

"All work and no play," he says. "Is your _friend_ another computer wizard?"

"We went to school together," she says, cursing herself for politeness. She really doesn't owe him answers to any of his impertinent questions, except he won't leave her alone.

"I really would like to see you again," he says.

"Well, now you're seeing me now, but I have a train to catch," she replies.

"So you only date other wizards," he says.

It's already too late—how the _hell _is she going to find a place now? It's still daylight and she's out on the street in view of the cameras. She can't just Apparate and blink out of view. She'd have had better luck in the building, a loo or a broom closet if she could have found one. Maybe she can lose him in the crowd pushing into the underground.

"I don't have _time_ for this," she says, walking faster, "but if you want a hypothetical answer to your hypothetical question of who I'd date if I had time for such a thing, the answer is yes. Only other wizards." _The exact truth, _she thinks_. More than you deserve, you self-satisfied git._

"You really should reconsider," he says, keeping pace. "More things in heaven and earth. Think of what you're missing."

"You don't want the complications," she says. "Trust me on that. Now I _really_ have to go."

"But you _are_ going. Rather quickly in fact." _This one just doesn't take hints. And he thinks he's a wit._

"Alone." She's picking up the pace and he's keeping up. There's a tube station up ahead. Maybe she can pull off the miracle of Apparating in plain sight, because at this point that's her only option if she wants to be on time.

The crowd is dense, and as they turn the corner she twists away from him, and still he manages to push something into her hand before she loses him in the multitudes.

No hope of being on time now. She scans for her pursuer, sees him nowhere in sight, and realizes she's just going to have to wait. She's going to be late anyway. It's quarter past five by the time she risks it and shimmies back up to street level against the flow of traffic, and even later (she's stopped checking her watch) by the time she finds a place to Apparate. Straight into the downstairs foyer, through the final layer of defenses and up the stairs to her bedroom. Drop the laptop bag next to the desk. What's that still in her hand? His damned _card._ The bleeding eejit thinks that after all of this there's a chance she's going to _call_ him.

She shucks her work clothes, hangs them up, throws on jeans and a warm shirt, robes on top. What did she need to bring for visiting Neville? Nothing she can think of right now, but a heavy cloak will be important. It will be cold up there. Apparate to the gates of Hogsmeade. Forty-five minutes late.

Neville, bless him, is still waiting.

She's forty-five minutes late, and it's mortifying that she's made him wait, especially when she forgot to use the time-turner. She could have, it was right there at hand, and she in a locked room…

"Oh, Neville, I'm so sorry," she says, pulling her cloak about her. "And it's cold…"

He smiles at her, and reminds her that this is why warming charms were invented. He offers his arm, and she takes it, and they side-along Apparate to that alley outside Purge & Dowse. It's snowing, and she's still mentally cursing herself for somehow letting Nigel follow her out of the building; she'll have to think of a better way in future—short of hexing him on the spot, which is looking more tempting all the time.

"Penny for your thoughts," Neville says. They're in the lift now, going up to the closed ward.

"Annoying day," she said, "and that git Nigel Black would try to corner me on my way out of work."

He smiles. "Oh is that the banker that Dean was telling us about?"

She blinks, trying to remember when they would have had that conversation.

"At your birthday party," he reminds her. She has her hand tucked through the crook of his elbow yet, and she remembers just now, and withdraws it. He looks disappointed for a moment, then settles his face into its usual good cheer.

***

It's no less grim than it's been on the previous visits, and as she sits to one side, listening to his pleasant baritone rise and fall, she realizes that she's been taking notes. _Take it in stride that the people who gave you life are beyond mortal reach, will never recognize you, and take it cheerfully—take it like a man, take it like a woman, like a full-fledged grown-up, and do your best to make it cheerful for them. _ She watches the flickers of pleasure, like watery sunlight, on the wasted faces of his mother and father, as that voice wraps them round. She's seen the same look on the faces of the greenhouse children, when he was teaching them the Patronus Charm. Little Wilhelmina, the gang leader, who for the interval of that lesson turned back into a little girl, as he walked her through a fascinating game. Never mind that in the world outside things are grim and getting grimmer, that Wilhelmina lost her entire family…

As it has transpired, she heard the details of those deaths from Crabbe, whose father had to do with that. Not satisfied with physical torture, Crabbe had to give her images for her nightmares. Of course he wasn't satisfied with physical torment. People with a taste for torture don't limit themselves; they hammer away at their victims until there's nothing left to resist, nothing but a shapeless mass of wounds…

Whether that can be healed by ordinary kindness is a question of another sort entirely. She watches the artificial dusk growing, in the charmed windows of the closed ward, and hears, two aisles down, the mellifluous voice of the mad Lockhart, asking for yet another picture to autograph. She shudders. Yes, another expert at memory charms, yes? Golden and vainglorious, until his own trick backfired on him… and no, they haven't restored his memory or anything like it.

She had best take notes on Neville's bedside manner, because she may well be needing that herself, if it transpires that she didn't do that exactly right.

And if that is the case, will she be doing this alone? She stares at the floor, a grey patch of institutional tile. Funny how some things are the same in both worlds: the drabness of hospitals, the accumulation of paperwork… well, she supposes in the halls of the Ministry it's parchment-work, though she's not sure where it is they find all the sheep or goats, or if the documents of the Ministry are palimpsests like their medieval counterparts in her world.

There's a warm touch on her arm, and she startles to find Neville looking at her, all that tender attention disconcertingly focused on her. "Hermione, are you all right?"

She nods, but she can feel the tears in her eyes that belie the gesture. She was fine, really, until he asked.

"It's upsetting," he says. "You don't have to come with me here, you know."

"No," she says. "I have to know how to do it." If he wouldn't look at her as if he cared about her, she would find it much easier to pull herself together. "You know what Derwent said. If I didn't do it absolutely right…"

There's a hollow groan from the bed: Neville's mother is looking about, with an expression of alarm. "Sorry," Hermione whispers. "Tone of voice. I forgot."

Neville pats her hand, and says, "However it turns out, you're not alone." She looks at him.

"You were not exactly forgiving when I told you what I'd done."

"It's easy enough to judge from the outside," he says. "You said that they'd be just where they would if it had been Bellatrix. Well, that's not true. It makes a difference if it's a slip of the scalpel or a night of torture. Even if they can't remember."

"The result's the same." She isn't sure if the tears were worse, or this hollow, leaden certainty of disaster.

"You don't know yet what's happened."

No, but if she thinks of this in the subjunctive, then that will admit the painful flicker of hope; best to assume the worst case and learn what she will need to live with it.

She gets up and smooths his mother's pillow, and receives in response that vague smile. They respond to tones of voice and to the feel in the room. This is the place where he learned that reassuring manner: in the place where nothing can be healed, looking after the ones who never will recover.

***

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Friday 20 November 1998**

It was on the lift on the way down from Spell Damage that Lavender Brown stepped in, at the floor for Dangerous Creatures, smiled at us both, and then reminded me of Madam Rosmerta's invitation. It did me no good to protest that I had work tomorrow; no, that wouldn't do, since I could go with her after work.

And she already knew about the money problem, thank you, and that was taken care of; the very least she could do was to treat, although she rather suspected that wouldn't be an issue.

My Friday workday is sixteen hours long, with the little snatched nap at my parents' house before I head back to the Ministry from the City of London for more of the same, courtesy of the time-turner. Of course, I can't mention _that_ arrangement, as it's Most Secret.

Lavender is insistent, if nothing else; I'm beginning to appreciate how little say Ron had in the matter once she set her cap at him.

So it was that I found myself sitting between her and Neville, in the Three Broomsticks, of a Friday night. Not just _any_ Friday night, but that's nothing I'm going to tell the two of them. I have an early morning date, not for flying lessons this time, but for a tryst with the dead.

Lavender said, "Oh, relax. It's Friday night."

To which, in no universe I've ever inhabited, would I reply, "But I have to get up early tomorrow, because I'm doing a lost weekend with Draco Malfoy."

(The little sod _still_ hasn't given me any indication of whose hair he wants for our assignation on Sunday, which is really irritating me. I have put up with procrastination from Ron and Harry for simply _years,_ and I'm not about to tolerate it from Malfoy. Not that I have much of a choice.)

Madam Rosmerta came to the table, glowing in her baroque beauty as if she were the earthly apotheosis of the Goddess of Hospitality. Unbidden she set a flagon of butterbeer in front of me, and told me that I need not avoid her establishment, as I had a lifetime tab.

I admit that I stared.

She told me that there was no point in pretending; she remembered how much I loved butterbeer, and that I'd said in her hearing that her shepherd's pie rivaled Molly Weasley's.

That I couldn't deny.

And while none of us would ever be what we were, I'd done the best for her of anyone in the post-war, for which I had her thanks. She reckoned it as a life debt, and until there was a second Battle of Hogwarts in which she could do me the courtesy of slaying my foes, she would thank me to order anything I liked. Although she had to say, in all modesty, that the shepherd's pie tonight was extraordinarily good, and I looked as if I might need a hearty meal.

I blinked, trying not to burst into tears. Things are turning around, suddenly; on Monday, after my return from the weekend at Longbottom House, the mid-afternoon tea and biscuits at Derwent's office had been replaced by something that called itself tea but more resembled a full buffet. Given that everyone talks to everyone else, I suspect the heavy hand of Augusta Longbottom.

I was trying not to cry, but I didn't succeed, because Neville chose that moment to take my hand and squeeze it.

Lavender said to me, "She's right, you know. You should eat."

Madam Rosmerta said that she would be back with the shepherd's pie.

I would have hidden my face in my hands, pleading exhaustion in order to hide the tears, but Neville enclosed me in his arms, and held me close so that I could feel the warmth of his chest and the way that my tears were soaking into his shirt. Lavender patted my back. All the while I was thinking that this was really unseemly; I was sobbing my heart out _in public_ … except that the noise was gone; someone must have cast _Muffliato._

***

It's Friday night, and she's just reviewed the procedure with Malfoy one last time, and asked him for the last time if he assents to it; in spite of everything, he's said yes. Waspishly, with his usual sneer: "Oh Granger, do relax." Everyone is telling her to relax. It's really quite annoying.

This is how it's done, which she's not writing down even in her encrypted notebook, because likely it's worth a term in Azkaban. Certainly it's outside the scope that McGonagall intended when she loaned her the time-turner in the first place. And what kind of world turns over such a device to a teenager because they need it to work two jobs? No, she's not asking that question because questioning reality is going to get her precisely nowhere.

For her assignation with an old enemy, she is going to be abducting him to her heavily fortified pied-a-terre in suburban London, which is a violation of the terms of his house arrest.

They will walk to Hogsmeade, under guard of the Aurors per usual, walk around the corner at the post office, where a blind wall faces the alley; she will cast _Muffliato_, then Apparate—well, side-along Apparate, given his condition. Once they're finished, she will set the time-turner to ten seconds after their departure, and Apparate. They will blink out silently, reappear just as silently, and the Aurors will be none the wiser. Precision work.

And while they're ascending and descending the staircase in her parents' house, he has to be blindfolded and silenced, lest they encounter their earlier or later selves and he panic and set off some kind of disturbance… no, she won't think about what kind she dreads. There are so many kinds.

She's already rehearsed the protocol solo, so she's fairly certain she can pull it off with a passenger in tow. This is bad behavior, of course. Bad judgment. High risk sexual activity—what could be more high risk than something that could land you in the hellish tower in the North Sea, or worse, land someone else there? Even someone you hate. Or yet worse, disrupt your timeline and possibly the flow of history in your general vicinity? And then there's public disgrace to think about, since the whole thing makes you look less than principled. It's private, though: a matter of—well, no, not lust precisely—some kind of compulsion that's about sex, but just as much about power, and about going places you know you shouldn't.

Oh yes, she adds, and the places to which you shouldn't go. Several, in fact, which she has already recited to herself: the Polyjuice impersonation is already considered kinky, and add on top of that the pseudo-necromancy, and the ethically dubious proposition of not telling her partner the identity of the Polyjuice revenant for whom he's to be the canvas, when it's his own cousin. She's not sure that she considers Draco a reliable informant about wizarding culture—after all, he considered her existence out-of-bounds for a long time—but he certainly represents one school of thought, and "wizarding culture" isn't monolithic. Luckily she had Derwent's warning about the "edgy sex appeal" of Dark magic in certain Pureblood subcultures, so his bizarre reaction to her spontaneous Killing Curse makes a strange kind of sense.

Spell that out. He thought it was sexy. "Very Dark, very Pureblood," he said. He was more than willing to ignore her actual blood status if she could do things like that—such as almost kill him for a dirty look. After all, he probably imprinted on the likes of Bellatrix.

No, she's not going to think about that, because it's not a sexy thought. And anyway, it's only this once. Well, twice. As of Sunday night, it's over. And she's not going to have stupid thoughts like "what could go wrong?" because she could write seven or eight feet of parchment on that question. The fates hate you when you ask that as a rhetorical question. It's like singing about how happy, happy, happy you are in act one of the opera. Anyone who does that will be dead, and horribly, by the end of act three.

***

**Author's notes: **

**First, an anniversary**. Today (Saturday 24 April 2010) marks the first anniversary of my venture into writing fan-fiction. See the opening section of the as-yet-unfinished _Four O'Clock in the Morning_ for the very first time I heard the voices of Rowling's characters. As well, a record: _Amends,_ now in its thirty-fifth chapter, is the longest thing I've ever written in any genre.

**Second, a warning.** As no doubt is crashingly obvious, the next chapter will contain naughty bits. For those who disapprove of that sort of thing, please brace yourselves. For those who have read this story in the hopes of encountering naughty bits, I applaud your patience for enduring thirty-five chapters of stuff that mostly isn't sex in order to get to the good part.

**More acknowledgments:** Neville's connection with the caving club is A. J. Hall's invention, as is her picture of Neville as a very resilient child. The suggestion that the Dementors may have been demons summoned by Dark means comes from JOdell aka RedHen. Andrei Karkaroff, the Latin volume on Dementors, and the holdings of the Durmstrang Institute library are my extension of those speculations.

Allusions to others' work: "green and pleasant land" (William Blake, "Jerusalem"); "children of the night" (Bram Stoker, _Dracula_).


	36. Chapter 36

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

* * *

What's been disturbing for the last weeks is that Potions revision has inevitably reminded her of sex. This had _not_ been a problem in previous years, because neither Severus Snape nor Horace Slughorn provoked fantasies of fleshly bliss, nor had Draco Malfoy's pointy face suggested anything more to her than the necessity of watching where his shifty eyes lighted next, which might give her a hint about what was going to come hurtling Harry's way, while she frantically whispered instructions to Neville so _he _wouldn't blow anything up while she was otherwise occupied …

Potions class had really been _most_ distracting, but not _that _way.

Now he looks up at her over his smoking cauldron, as Luna chops the next round of ingredients, and licks his lips, and once (Merlin help them all) he _winks._ A good thing Ron didn't see that.

Then he gives her a heavy-lidded look that she supposes he means as sultry… It's all very cheesy and theatrical in a silent-film or nineteenth-century way, and she wonders which long-dead Muggle exemplar of seduction he's aping. Maybe Valentino, because he told her that Pansy Parkinson had a serious fan-crush on Theda Bara…

It isn't until he turns back to his work, absently humming under his breath, that she remembers the thing he means her to remember.

At the end of the journey, he was singing.

Right before, he tensed, eyes squeezed shut and hands clenching over her wrists, and then his hips bucked under her and she felt the pulse and the rush, and at the same time he let go of her, let go of everything and his head went back and his eyes opened and his mouth too—and she noticed the auroral flush lighting his pale skin from within. He wasn't trying to form words; it wasn't not her name or a god's name or a curse word but pure sound—a clear pale tenor voice singing the sunrise in the middle of the night.

Tenor. _Or contralto,_ some perverse shadow of a suggestion said in the back of her head where forbidden thoughts live.

She leaned forward and gathered him up; he was swooning, boneless, and she kissed his throat where she could feel his pulse pounding, sucked vampire kisses along the clavicle and then up the side of the neck to the earlobe. She kissed his mouth, which was shockingly cold (_no wonder, _she thought, _all the blood is somewhere else_).

"Oh," he said. Shivered.

Then, "That was _amazing._"

And finally, in more like his ordinary tone, "Granger, I owe you. Again."

What he didn't say aloud, but she could read as if he'd written it on the darkness in letters of fire: _And I will remember this in Azkaban, until they take it all away._

* * *

Friday night, she reviews once more the very interesting letter from Viktor. It's odd to hear from him after so long, yet he elides that lapse of correspondence, gracefully alluding to the war and her very impressive role in it. He tells her that he's very definitely going to be in London for the War Crimes Trials. His uncle and aunt who sit on the International Quidditch Commission will be there, and so they would be properly chaperoned if she would like to have dinner or drinks. His treat, of course.

And he understands from conversations with his cousin Andrei that she's been making some very interesting inquiries, and he's reminded of the conversation they had at the Yule Ball, about Necromancy…

Ron might have been somewhat reassured if he could have heard the conversation between herself and Viktor as they whirled away in each other's arms: he was telling her about how Necromancy was in fact still taught at Durmstrang, in theory only, though the laboratory did cover Reverse Necromancy and Banishing Rites. The difficulty, of course, is in guessing the name of the thing that you wish to Banish, because if you cannot call it by its right name, it will do worse than laugh at you …

The literature is full of cautionary tales on this point.

Viktor's style of writing reminds her a bit of his style of flying: graceful, madcap, full of stylish swooping and diving. Speaking, of course, in his second language (no, actually English is his _fourth,_ after French and Latin) his clumsiness is half his eloquence, but writing—well, it's the difference between his clumsy duck-footed walk on the ground and what he becomes when he takes flight …

If she's thinking what he thinks she's thinking, there are some interesting volumes he can recommend… nothing that's in print in wizarding Britain, though there are clandestine collections. One such is at Malfoy Manor, which he understands has been Decommissioned.

"Good riddance to bad rubbish," she reads between the lines, and remembers the way that he bared his teeth when he glanced over his shoulder at Draco dancing with Pansy. (He'd told her sotto voce that the little snip had dared to praise Grindelwald in his hearing, and he'd put a stop to it by suggesting that there might not be a Malfoy heir next generation if that line of discussion continued… which was the first time she'd ever heard the name of Grindelwald from living lips. Professor Binn, of course, doesn't count, being both crashingly dull and a ghost.)

If her Ministry connections are not adequate to the purpose, or if she wishes to be discreet, he can make inquiries, and if she likes, he might bring some volumes with him when he comes for the trials. They're nothing that you want to request formally from a library, even Durmstrang.

* * *

On Halloween night, in the dark of the night, Viktor's name had come up in conversation, in rather a different connection. Draco, yawning like the proverbial cat overfed with cream, considered her notions about Polyjuice and said, "Now I know what Krum was smirking about."

"What do you mean?"

"Remember fourth year? The Yule Ball and all that? Every time we were going on about, excuse the expression, _swotty bushy-haired mudbloods,_ he'd smile in this really annoying _enigmatic_ way as if we were dumb as trolls and completely missing the point. As if we were stupid kids and he was a man of the world."

"You mean every time _you_ were going on like that. About me."

"Well, yes, but I thought we weren't doing the enemies thing any more."

"As of fourth year we were doing it." For some reason she wanted to laugh, but suppressed the urge. "So what do you _think_ I was doing with Krum?"

"Switching bodies with him and shagging him senseless."

"Malfoy, that's _really_ perverse." He smirked, and she remembered that she really had no call for that moral indignation, given what she'd done with _his_ body. And in any case, he was likely bluffing, given how disturbed he'd been at the initial suggestion. It had been far more fun than she'd anticipated, shocking Draco Malfoy, so she added, "But now that you mention it, an interesting idea. Want to try it?"

"Just how much Polyjuice do you have stockpiled?"

She read that as an indication that he was game, having gotten over the initial shock of the idea.

With a pang of regret, she considered an alternate universe, in which she and Draco spent their sixth and seventh year snogging in random broom closets all over Hogwarts, when they weren't blowing things up over the Quidditch pitch … a world in which were no Dark Lords lurking, only a surfeit of teenage hormones.

* * *

**From the journal of Hermione Granger **

**Saturday 21 November 1998**

We struck our bargain on Halloween, and I confirmed it yesterday before I set off for work in London, just in case he'd only agreed in his state of post-coital giddiness. Strike that and rewrite: in his euphoria at his newly minted non-virgin status in the heterosexual league. But the thing he wouldn't tell me is whose hair he wanted for the _other_ defloration. I would have thought that two weeks would be enough for him to come up with a name, and I really can't abide procrastination. Harry and Ron made me half crazy with that _for years _and now I have to go through it with bloody Malfoy.

And today… well, today I got what I wanted. What I thought I wanted. But of course, like most granted wishes, it didn't go quite according to plan.

When I came back upstairs from my Potions lab with the two tumblers of Polyjuice, the initial dose and the booster, he had taken off all of the clothes he'd been wearing under the school robes, and hung them over the chair: two layers of full-length robes in fine wool, a full-length garment in dark green silk, and a white silk tunic or shirt. Rather a lot of layers, and all of them medieval. I suppose if he can't manage warming charms, the castle is uncomfortably cold.

Through the half-open door, I saw him pause to luxuriate in the warmth of the central heating, standing just over the floor vent and letting the warm air flow over his bare skin, before he shrugged on the school robe again. I hung back a bit, because I had the feeling that he wouldn't like to be caught indulging himself in Muggle luxury.

I dropped the hair into the glass of Polyjuice with my back to him, and I watched it bubble and swirl and then clear to a lovely concoction the color of sunrise, and the smell coming off it reminded me of the flowery-grassy scent I'd caught on the breeze off the moors, just after dawn. (Neville laughed when I asked him to identify it. He said, "It's _everything_, all at once.")

I turned and handed the glass to Draco.

"This is going to hurt," I said.

"I know," he replied. And then I remembered what Harry told me about him Polyjuicing Crabbe and Goyle into little girls all sixth year to serve as lookouts while he labored at his Vanishing Cabinet hack. I realized he would have seen _them_ doubled over in agony in the throes of transformation. And nonetheless he would have insisted they do it the next time he needed lookouts, the little shit. _A la guerre comme a la guerre. _

_But this is the post-war_.

He took the glass and raised it. "Cheers," he said, and downed it in one gulp. He smirked at me, in about the last second when his face was _his,_ and then it began. His features blurred and melted and rearranged, and he curled in on himself clutching his belly. I winced sympathetically; I remember the feeling of my bones and my guts rearranging themselves when I turned into Bellatrix for our jaunt to Gringotts. Oh yes, Bellatrix. _His aunt._ But we won't think about that, because Bellatrix Lestrange is the last person I want to think about when I'm about to…

He straightened up again, except he wasn't _he. _There was Tonks, in black robes a little long for her, with her hair flaring turquoise and ultramarine and gas blue, like a candle flame in the wrong part of the spectrum. "That didn't hurt as much as advertised," she said. And her voice was absolutely right, but the intonation was wrong.

She smiled at me. No, she _smirked._ On her face, it came out as mischief. Her eyes sparkled. "So what do you want to do with me now that you have me?" she said. "Whoever it is that I am."

Oh no no no. It looked like Tonks, and sounded like Tonks, but the vocal inflection, and the _thought,_ were pure Draco Malfoy.

How unspeakably creepy. I was facing Tonks possessed by Draco.

I realized in that split-second just how much of my crush was about the personality, how much of it was love and longing for someone I'd never see again, and mourning for lost chances. You know, the stuff of poetry and those songs on the radio my mum used to sing along with. My mum the dentist, the crisp rationalist whose solid good sense she congratulated me on having inherited.

I reached over and put a finger on his lips. Her lips. _Because the dead don't talk._

She smiled and nodded.

_Girls just wanna have fun…_

She opened her arms to me and smiled and this time it wasn't a smirk but a real smile, that lit up her heart-shaped face and twinkled in the little dimple that nestled about a half-inch from the left corner of her mouth. I hesitated. She cocked her head to one side, still smiling, and lifted a single eyebrow. A purple one, as it happens. The other one was deep blue. Took a step forward, and tripped over the robes. _Sweet Nimue,_ it _was_ her. With mismatched eyebrows, yet.

I stepped forward to catch her, and she pitched into my arms.

She kissed me first. Well, I _had_ told Draco what I had in mind—well, some of it, by innuendo and parallel structure; I'd told him I wanted an arrangement like the one he wanted.

Apparently Draco is very good at parallel structure.

And I can't compare because I never kissed Tonks in life, but it was sweet and a little clumsy and very wet, and thus far in character. As long as he didn't open his mouth _to talk_, he was doing fine.

And then she kissed me in earnest.

It was the most sumptuous kiss I've ever had, all peaches and nectarines; it was velvet couches and silk sheets and the most delicious chocolate torte you've ever eaten that leaves you sticky all over your face and you don't care. I was the one who carried it into the countryside, so to speak, kissing all the way across her cheek and licking that little dimple that I didn't realize had unbearably enticed me in life…

I kissed and licked and hummed to myself all the way down her neck to her clavicle and then inside the collar of her robes and yes, down her sternum, because the black robes were giving way before me, her fingers undoing them nimbly just ahead of me, and then to either side to the slight rise of her breasts.

And then there was a delighted giggle. Pure Tonks.

"Ooh, I had no idea breasts were so much _fun!"_

The inflection was utterly Tonks but the thought had to belong to Draco. After all, having breasts had to be old news to Tonks by age twenty-something.

* * *

I kissed her on the mouth. It was a deep kiss, and very satisfying, and when I opened my eyes…

I almost screamed. Who was looking back at me was a young Bellatrix Lestrange: jet-black hair, hooded eyes, aristocratic features whose hauteur was written in bone rather than muscle.

I gulped to suppress the up-rush of bile… no, I was _not_ kissing Bellaix. She was dead. And this face wasn't her, anyway…

I closed my eyes and rested, trying to be neutral, but of course you can't be neutral if there are only two of you. And she—he—it—kept kissing me, and I was shaking all over, and no doubt he thought it was arousal.

And then I opened my eyes again; and there was me—I mean a face that looked a great deal like me, except plainly it wasn't. Some things were softened, others more pronounced… it was my face, actually, as seen through a seriously glamorized soft-focus lens.

It was me, with a little touch of Bellatrix.

The thought hit with a wave of nausea and fear. Whatever the arcana of Pureblood sexual etiquette, it probably doesn't include vomiting on your partner.

But the voice, when relaxed, was Tonks…

She was—_had been_—a Metamorphmagus, but this was not her. It was a husk, with some of her reflexes. What I saw—was what _he _was thinking, what he was imprinting on.

Teddy has begun to do that, Dean told me; sometimes he has black hair like Harry, and green eyes, sometimes Ginny's hazel eyes and red hair… but he doesn't need a wand. He's a baby, and he does this magic: shape-shifting, which is purely and plainly embodied, wandless magic.

Tonks didn't need a wand … briefly I wondered, if I were to place my wand in his hand, her hand, just now, if he'd be able to do anything with it. He had the borrowed magic of her body, but he hadn't any control, of course, which is why the hair wouldn't stabilize, why the eyebrows were mismatched, why the face—her face—wouldn't settle.

It occurred to me … that Tonks was a magical creature. Metamorphmagi are rare, and if I'm right, not quite human. Certainly, in the Muggle world, shape-shifters are sinister in nearly every story I've ever heard. I didn't want to conjecture about why the face shifted to Bellatrix … and I didn't want to tell him to stop thinking about her, because he clearly had no idea I could see it.

Of course, _he_ couldn't see it. I had been very careful to remove all the mirrors.

And I'd gone to such trouble for this assignation, and risked so much, both on my side and on his …

I closed my eyes, and let those soft kisses caress my face, let my hands wander over her shoulders and breasts, and felt that wild magic subside a little, as she sighed and put her arms around me. I remembered how much I loved her changeable face and her elfin sense of humor, how much I'd wished I could be like her—well, _like_ was as much as could be managed, and the likeness of the body wasn't enough, for I'd had that—briefly inhabited her body—and it had left me hungry, because she wasn't there. Nonetheless, the warmth of her, nestling against me, softness and springy muscle where her cousin (the vessel for her resurrection) was bony or sinewy, soothed me.

Cautiously I let my eyes open a little: Bellatrix was gone, except for the characteristic Black chin and cheekbones, and the structure of the eye sockets and the bridge of the nose: the facial features that Tonks shared with her mother, her aunt Narcissa, her cousin Draco. This time, the face was heart-shaped, the impish expression paradoxically making it nearly unbearably sweet …

I wanted more than anything else to talk to her, but of course the mind behind that longed-for face wasn't hers, and so I would have to content myself with making love to the simulacrum.

She already had her hands inside my robes, and she was whispering in my ear that I was wearing far too much, as her hands pulled my shirttails out of my jeans. I followed that thought with my lips, across her chest to the soft part where I could no longer feel ribcage, and my hands slid up her waist, crumpling the fabric of her robes under my spread fingers and I lifted each one and kissed my way around each in turn, circling the aureola in an erotic spiral like a dying orbit …

… and I'd had no idea I had so _many_ ideas about what to do, knowing _nothing_ about this except from my parents' broadminded library, which rather tended to the clinical, and yes, a few spicy novels I'd heard recommended but really I never was a novel reader, not for years now—not since my Hogwarts letter at what, age eleven?—not when my summers were spent in cramming for the next round of defending against the Dark Arts—and my schoolmates—oh, yes, one of whom I was _doing_ just now under the guise of my lost love, _no we are not going to think about that right now._

Anyway, it was a good thing I was precocious in reading naughty literature when I had the chance circa age eleven to twelve, because this was the first I've had the chance to do the practicum and at least I had some theoretical preparation. Snogging Ginny didn't count, and what I'd done with her brother… well, suffice it to say that the Weasleys take the initiative, and all they say of passionate gingers is true, at least for those two.

… and now she was bumping against my leg, yes, opening her thighs against mine, something wet and searing against me and she was _thrusting_ and I …

... I thought that was going to be the difficult part, I mean it sounded rather _icky _ in the descriptions, but no, going south seemed just the thing to do at this season; spicy and aromatic trade winds wafted me on my way and I don't know exactly how it arranged itself but it did and I had a firm hold on the architecture of her hips and she was strong, solid and flexible.

As I kissed my way south from her navel to the blessed isles, I realized that this was _not_ the body of a woman who had given birth. This was in fact the very Tonks I had fallen in love with, yes yes yes. The very one. My lost love. Quite unexpectedly I started to cry as I reached the gateway to that possible-impossible world where she waited as my lover. My lost, my impossible, my adored, my missed chance, the mischance that as a stupid fifteen-year-old I hadn't had the gall, the guts, the gumption to make a pass at her, that I hadn't tried to snag that comet on her near approach before she swung out of my ken toward the distant stars…

I felt it first under my tongue and then like an earthquake moving out from epicenter it rocked into the hips and her thighs shuddered against my face and then I stupidly slid back into conscious mind just in time to realize that my calculation of our common center of mass was already wrong and we—by then a couple or at least a coupled system—tottered, tip-tilted in a tangle of limbs, and I fell forward, she backward, with a rather undignified crash, cushioned only somewhat by the half-discarded robes. Erotic slapstick. I landed on top of her, and distinctly heard the thud of skull against floor. _Her_ skull. The back of the skull, whose name I forget, inside of which lives the cerebellum, which controls the autonomic nervous system. That's how you can kill someone with a blow to the back of the head.

_They call it the little death but let's not take this too literally. _

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Bloody fucking _fuck._"

_My feelings precisely. And that choice of words is Tonks to the life. _

"Sorry," I said.

She sat up with a disgruntled expression, rubbing the back of her head. _The occiput, yes, that's the word I was forgetting._ "I had no idea you were such a _strenuous_ lover," she said.

"I'm sorry," I repeated. "Other than that, was it… all right?"

She sat the rest of the way up and grinned. "Utterly _fantastic_," she said. "Only next time let's improve on the dismount."

She stood up.

Then she stood _me_ up, lifted me to my feet, placed me, with my shoulders against the wall, _positioned_ me, hips against the wall, legs apart. "Stability, Granger, _stability._ Three points of support." I went cold, flinched: meat on a slab. Tonks _never _called me Granger.

She knelt in front of me, hands on my thighs, looked up. "What's wrong?"

"You called me the wrong name."

A momentary flash of puzzlement and then the realization. "Oh," and it was unexpectedly sad. Very tentatively: "Hermione."

I nodded.

She rubbed her cheek against my thigh. Velvet, with a tickle of eyelashes. "Hermione." Tried out the syllables of my name like a song. Delicious contralto, hot breath against skin already too sensitive, feathered fingertips up my legs, under my open robes. I quivered where I stood as the tension from standing vied with the tension set up by that touch. Masterful. I already knew how this would end, and couldn't wait. Open hands, palms soft as satin, tickling touch like piano arpeggios on the inner thigh. I followed it, involuntarily, with my hips. "Oh, not yet, not yet… _Hermione. _You're _impatient,_" she crooned. Teased me.

After a few verses of that song, the first touch of her tongue was awkward, as if she'd expected to find something else.

As if she'd expected…

But that thought was very dim, a tiny fish in the cold deeps. The surface waters were deliciously sunlit, aquamarine and coral. I let the unwanted thought swim around down there in the blue-black, and tried to ignore it, as I felt the soft sleek heat change its mind and shape itself to actual conditions, wind and writhe and wriggle cunningly into what it found, warm-blooded and heat-seeking. Felt it tease and tickle and tweak; felt tongue, tongue and lips, tongue and lips and teeth.

I let the crescendo of incoming waves build, rocking, drawing out to sea then moving toward shore, rocking, each time higher, each time closer, hotter, less conscious, legs tensed but ever nearer liquefaction. When finally it shivered up from the arches of my feet and they wanted to lift from the floor, I was pinned firmly in place, writhing with my back against the wall and my lover's open hands on my hipbones, as I rocked and flexed and opened in helpless delight.

"T… ahhhh," I said, catching myself before I shaped the name.

Released, I slid down the wall, bare back and bum against cool plaster, robes riding up behind me, legs spreading to either side of her. My hands in her hair, grasping handfuls of it. Pulling her head to me, kissing her, tasting myself. What had sounded disgusting to the eleven-year-old who first read about it, but felt delicious in present tense.

Finally she disengaged her mouth from mine, and said, "Ah … could we not sit on the floor? It's _chilly._"

I had forgotten entirely that there was a bed in the room.

The bed in which I'd slept as a child… We stood, and then I embraced her and softly drew her down on that bed, arranged the robes under her, my arms around her, my head on her breast, my lips on her bare shoulder. I curled against her as if she were my mother. Her arms closed warm about me, and I settled into bliss. "I love you," I murmured, entirely forgetting myself.

* * *

I must have fallen asleep, because next thing I heard my name through fog in an unfamiliar voice. "Hermione." I tried to burrow back into the warm place where everything was fine, and it repeated. "Hermione!" It wasn't my mother; it wasn't time to get up for school, though there was something of her impatience in it.

I murmured and settled myself again, belly and breasts to the warmth under me, tried to pull the covers over me and find a comfortable spot.

"_Granger!"_

Everything clicked and the reflexes went into high alert like an air raid siren: _That's Malfoy. Where is my wand? _

In one motion, I threw off the covers, dived for my wand—shockingly, found it—and rolled to my feet. I came to full consciousness in dueling stance, wand out. Naked. And yes it was Malfoy, but he was sitting up in bed, naked as well, his long legs tangled in what looked like two sets of robes and staring up at me with an absolutely gobsmacked expression.

"Oh." I lowered my wand. "Sorry."

He raised one eyebrow and commenced to untangle his legs from the folds of drapery, and then to separate the two garments one from the other.

He tossed me my robes. "Put on some clothes. You scare me like that."

I put them on, noticed they were inside-out, took them off again to reverse them, and rummaged about on the bureau for the rest of my clothes. "Keep going with compliments like that, Malfoy, and you can forget another date."

"I mean that you look like some kind of allegorical figure of Righteous Vengeance and you had your wand pointed at my heart, and _if _you don't mind, you've already cracked my head on the floor so you _don't_ need to compound the offense with the Killing Curse."

He stretched his arms out and then leaned to one side to stretch his neck. "And you sleep like the _dead_ after good sex." I winced at his choice of words. He smirked. "So who is she?"

I stared at him. "That wasn't part of the bargain."

He didn't answer me, but got to his feet and walked over to the chair where he'd hung his clothes. Rather against my will, I noticed that he and Tonks both had long legs for their height, though her thighs were rather sturdier and her hips more dramatically flared—not entirely all the difference of sex, but something she must have inherited from her plump and sturdy father rather than the slim and willowy House of Black.

Of course his hips were narrower, and, yes, they both had that unexpectedly pert rump—no, I had not spent much time previously considering the rear view of my late annoyance (it had been more his back I'd been gratified to see, in the act of absenting itself).

He shrugged on the white tunic, over his head, and I watched in fascination as the fine fabric settled itself, shimmering, over his thighs. Then the next layer, dark green: from an esthetic point of view, it was entirely right that he had been Sorted into Slytherin House, for no other color made his pale skin glow like that, or nearly any, shade of green.

He turned to me and smirked. "I'll figure it out, Granger," he said. He counted the points off on his outstretched fingers. "She's a Quidditch player, or she was. Seeker, I think." He smirked at me again. "Brilliant reflexes but _clumsy._ On the ground at least. I bet she's incredible in the air." Licked his lips and _leered _at me. "She knew what she was doing, too. I hardly had to think at _all._ Just let her _reflexes_ take over."

His robes flared around him as he paced, doing up the fastenings. As he donned the last layer, the black school robes with the insignia of Slytherin, I spotted some turquoise hairs on the shoulders and discreetly Vanished them. No clues, no mirrors. It was none of his business who she was.

He laughed. "You really do collect them, don't you? I bet she plays for the Harpies—reserve Seeker, maybe? Who do I impersonate next, Gwenog Jones?" He stopped, as if considering the idea. "Though that could be fun, if your mystery girl is any indication."

"Malfoy, you have a dirty mind."

"Pot, kettle, Granger. Whose idea was this?"

"Which reminds me, _Malfoy,_ we have a little rendezvous for tomorrow that I've gone to some trouble for, and you haven't given me a name." He stopped, smirk gone. "Who do you want? Or at least whose hair would be acceptable?"

He looked at me, licking his lips, but this time it was more nervous than lascivious.

"Come up with a name, or either we cancel or I pull something random from the files."

"_The files?"_

_Brazen it out,_ I decided_. Lie a little, even. Push the procrastinating little git to the wall so he'll either cough up a name or cancel, because I do not have time for this charade. _

I continued, blithely improvising: "Well, you've got your choice of Weasleys—I think Charlie's rather fanciable, myself, and Percy's not bad either but it won't be the same without the glasses. Though as I said, I don't guarantee who you'll get if I just do a random draw. You could end up with Ron."

He looked at me in horror.

The nasty piece of me chortled quietly to itself at the unedifying image of Draco receiving his initiation at the hands of a simulacrum of Ron. _Nobody_ would be happy with that one. Not Draco, not Ron, and definitely not me. A shame it was pure bluff.

Then the sick thought flashed across my mind like a comet of ill omen and necessarily remained unspoken: _Or I could resurrect your darling Aunt Bella; I think I did end up with some extra hairs._ Followed by one even sicker: _and I might have something of your father's in there too._ Also not true, but could you imagine the look on his face?

_Shut up, _I said to whatever was conjuring this nauseating slide-show._ I don't need this right now._

_And my guess is only about half of the rumors about Malfoy family life are actually true. Maybe not even a quarter. They're probably charming people with a happy marriage and afternoon tea every day at four o'clock. Well, charming except for their little racial supremacy and genocide habit. But among their own, lovely people._

"Longbottom," he said. "Neville. He's right here. That should be easy."

It felt like a blow to the solar plexus, and I nearly doubled over, _though you knew this all along,_ said the sardonic voice in my head.

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself: "Malfoy, you thorough bastard." My own fault, of course; I'd known, but hadn't thought, hadn't wanted to think...

He looked at me, eyes wide and lip quivering, like a child threatened with loss of a treat. "You promised. Anyone I wanted."

Shape-shifter, like his cousin: only he changes age. I wanted to berate the manipulative eighteen-year-old, and here I was faced with a nine-year-old on the verge of tears.

He said, "And I fulfilled my part of the bargain, didn't I? Didn't I give you what you wanted?" and then, almost plaintively, "You liked it, didn't you?"

I nodded, though in the faded after-glow the face of Bellatrix flickered unbidden through memory with the chill of the grave—the grave I vowed then I would no longer violate. On the spot, before my resolution could falter, I took out that envelope, my precious cache of last traces of her niece and victim, and Vanished the lot.

_The grave's a fine and private place / But none, I think, do there embrace._

_As well it should be,_ that voice in my head added.

Then I startled as Draco Malfoy pulled me into an unexpectedly crushing hug and kissed me with something that felt very much like gratitude.

* * *

**Author's note:** "The grave's a fine and private place" (Marvell, "To his coy mistress").


	37. Chapter 37

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Note on posting schedule:** Due to Real Life commitments this week, _Amends_ is being updated early. The usual schedule will resume next week.

* * *

I blindfolded Draco and cast _Silencio _on him for the trip down the staircase to the foyer. The winter afternoon was darkening, and the gloom gathered in all the corners, as if to remind me what all this was, after all: the dying of the year and a tryst with the dead; the boy whose warm hand clutched mine so desperately was dying as well—or had only three months to live. Paradoxically, for all his icy Nordic looks, he runs a few degrees hotter than a normal person… or maybe he's just feverish, the lamp burning brightest right before it gutters out.

When I pulled him into the closet and looped the chain of the time-turner about both our necks, he tried to kiss me. I almost objected, and then realized that it served to distract him as I counted out the turns of the hourglass, but he noticed me pulling back and contented himself with rubbing his cheek against mine, an oddly feline gesture that gave me a little pang of longing for Crookshanks, at this hour no doubt about his business in Neville's rooms.

Neville. Yes. Another order of business, that.

I consulted my watch, and counted off the seconds until I heard the unmistakable crack of Apparition. I saw us going up the steps, myself leading and Draco feeling his way blindly, his pale hand reaching along the wall as if to read it with his fingertips.

I pulled him into a close embrace and side-along Apparated us back to Hogsmeade, lifted the _Muffliato,_and strolled back out of the alley to meet the Aurors, out of whose sight we'd been for too brief an instant—a few paces around the corner in that blind alley—that it excited no comment whatsoever. _Constant vigilance. _I wouldn't have been able to give Moody the slip like that, no.

But Moody is dead, and so is Tonks, and so are any number of people. Bellatrix Lestrange, for one—and now, thanks to Draco, I can't get rid of her face. I hope it does not follow me into my dreams tonight.

I did in fact have real business at the post office. I confided my reply to Victor to one of the Owl Post birds; yes, they're in the employ of the Ministry, but this letter is under heavy encryption, almost as heavy as what's on this notebook.

When I emerged from the post office, Draco asked if we might go to Honeydukes.

From the way that he looked at me, I could tell that he still wanted to kiss me, which would have been touching in anyone else. But the one I had to do with was not Draco, but his dead cousin—forever lost to me now. He was only the substrate.

Nonetheless, we walked into Honeydukes with our escort. Draco stood at the counter, ignoring the glare of the shop assistant, and pushed his coins across the counter to buy two Chocolate Frogs. He handed me one.

"The least I can do," he said. "Otherwise I wouldn't have had a Hogsmeade outing."

* * *

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Saturday night**

All day revising for NEWTs, and then in between I remembered some queries I wanted to run at the Ministry, and nipped out for a brief two hours that turned into six, but with the time-turner there's no such thing as being late for anything.

What's peculiar in all this: I love the work, I am drawn into it, even as I know that I'm being used. It's like a sick love affair in which you know that the other doesn't love you at all, that you are waltzing with the walking dead, and yet you persist … from habit. No, in this case, from the sheer joy of technical detail. I know I'm making history, though I'm finding increasingly disquieting the question of what that will look like a hundred or even ten years down the road.

Of course, there is the question of the debt to the Goblins. It's not as if I can leave.

And there's the question of Fidelius. Derwent told me that I'm to be put under the spell some time in December, once I'm given the ledgers from Malfoy Manor. It's odd that they've trusted me this far, isn't it? I could have answered any of those questions that Neville asked, about what Harry did in the war. I could have shouted from the rooftops what I saw in all those files.

Derwent looks at me with that considering glance of hers, and tells me that this complex variant of Fidelius is very specifically of her design, with some escape clauses to permit discussion of technical matters _as needed._ She will be the Secret-Keeper, and the secret is rather narrowly defined.

It has to do with money. Specifically, it has to do with the Malfoys' money. It strikes me odd that this is the crux of the matter, given the open discussion of the solution that supposedly will release me from my indenture some time in March or April…

I am beginning to suspect that all is not well, to put it very mildly. Bill Weasley sold me out—or so Augusta Longbottom hinted—and it's clear enough to me that Molly didn't either know or care. When I broke off with Ron, she drove me off, actually, by setting conditions that she knew I wouldn't accept… until October, when the weather-working got her attention. Given her reaction to my accusation—a stab in the dark, really—I'm _very_ strongly suspecting that she did in fact dose Tonks with Amortentia, to what end I don't know.

Ginny knocked me out of the air with a Bludger at Harry's birthday party, and then assaulted me another way in the loo of the Three Broomsticks, back in October. There's something wrong with her, as well, though what I don't know. She was disagreeable to me more than once in sixth year, but never this vicious or random.

Back in October seems like a very long time ago now. So much has happened—in my several lifetimes—since then. Augusta Longbottom's offer is enticing, and then I realize that it's another case of my being useful. Muggle-borns are increasingly rare, and oddly enough, prized, at least in certain circles, for our conspicuous competence—not a matter about which we have much choice, given our lack of family connections.

She mentioned Sophonisba Chattox. When I was at the Ministry this afternoon, I looked up the archives of the Muggle-born Registration Committee and learned what I already suspected: they didn't take into custody any of the Muggle-born staff of Chattox & Device, who instead turned up on Percy Weasley's extradition list. And we know what Percy did about _that._ The lot of them ended up in North America, and I imagine that the North American Minster for Magic had a good laugh at Percy's request. He likely managed to work in a few insults to the Micks and the Yanks there… or maybe just the hint, a nudge and a wink, that it wasn't to be taken seriously.

Sinead Pierce O'Halloran, her name is. I've seen her photograph once or twice in the _Prophet_ since the war; she's a black-haired Boston Irishwoman, with a square jaw and a dimpled cheek and a profusion of very stylishly windblown hair. From the allusions in the _Prophet_, I gather that the O'Hallorans are a North American political dynasty like their Muggle counterparts the Kennedys, and in fact came over to North America from Ireland around the same time. How they do _not_ resemble the Kennedys is the reputation for political martyrdom. The O'Hallorans have died in their beds, every last one of them, ripe in years and ready to embark on the next great adventure. Bridget O'Halloran, the great-great-grandmother of the current Minister, died just before Voldemort's return, at the age of a hundred and sixty.

Well, that's an American example we'd do well to imitate, though it's highly unlikely. The reprisals continue, and I don't think that the trials are going to stop them. Rather the contrary; war crimes trials with two major defendants are so plainly an act of ritual sacrifice that no one is taking them seriously, but taking matters into their own hands, as is the wizarding way. Strip off the veneer, and wizarding Britain is less the nation of shopkeepers than the Wild West, with its duels in broad daylight, its lynchings and its shootings in the back.

Though with the population estimates that I ran and Derwent confirmed, they can ill afford that. Someone aside from the Senior Healer and I ought to see those estimates, someone who might be able to _do_ something.

Harry treated me to the news of the ongoing reprisals, in the first conversation we've had in a while. He approached me after History of Magic revision this afternoon. He wants something, of course; why else be friendly with me after a lapse of months? No, I have to remember that the wild magic at the Burrow was in October, mid-October, and it's mid-November … late November, now.

Months have passed in my timeline, and I resent my friends for abandoning me. I was useful to them, and that's all. I asked Harry to show that I wasn't just the convenient walking encyclopedia and he proved it, all right, in the negative.

Nonetheless, I listen as he tells me about the reprisals, and the growing sense that the families of dead Death Eaters and Snatchers are gathering a sort of resistance, a mutual-protection league. With a shiver, I remember that the Mafia began so, as well. And then he hints around that something is _seriously_ amiss with Ginny, and might we talk about it.

I told him that I'm busy all week, but I might be able to pencil him in for Thursday. On his tab, of course, because as he knows I have no money in this world. I'm done with being ashamed of it; I'm carrying the debt for the whole lot of them. Why should I slink?

And Neville's Gran has been kind, but it's very plainly self-interested; I'm reading between the lines that she's looking to cultivate me, to win me over to her side from the Ministry. What will she do, buy me out? And then whose bond-slave will I be? I'm no fool; nothing is free in this world, particularly not when you're not one of theirs.

And Neville …

Neville may be a stalking-horse for his grandmother's political schemes, or not.

I wonder if they're all still afraid that I'm the _next Dark Lord,_ and have simply changed tack. That's why they're being kind … after all, everyone was rather nasty to Tom Riddle, and look how _that_ turned out.

I am exhausted, of course, and this doesn't help my faith in human nature…

"To the essential rottenness of human nature," I toasted Neville, "and to your beautiful eyes."

I wish that had been a joke.

There's one other piece of business I transacted at the post office. I sent a letter to Gringotts, a request to meet with Griphook, this time on my own, about the state of my debt. I want to see the balance sheet, and know the details so far as he's willing to tell me. Before I believe anyone else's blandishments on the subject, I'm going to talk to the source. Maybe I can find out something about their position and how negotiable it is. I'm not sure I trust the Remus Lupin Foundation; they have their own agenda, and it's some of the same people who laughed at me when I started S.P.E.W.

I remember, with some bitterness, that Draco Malfoy had better success with his 'Potter Stinks' campaign than I had with S.P.E.W. If he'd been a Muggle, he would have been a public relations _genius, _practically a natural. In an alternate universe (one in which I had a budget and he wasn't headed to Azkaban) I would hire him to run the publicity campaign for S.P.E.W. version 2.0.

The letter I just sent off to Viktor is a commitment, as well, to something I may not survive. The debt to the Goblins may be a moot point, after all. The less they give me to live for, the more of a gambler I become. I'll wait to see what these books of his say, but if, as he hints, we might have even the slimmest chance of Banishing that not-so-ancient evil…

… we could bring down the Ministry.

… or fail, and suffer nature's penalty on unsuccessful Necromancers.

Another layer of encryption. I didn't write that sentence. Either of them.

I want to know what's happening with my parents, before I go forward with this. Surely someone, somewhere in wizarding Britain can talk to someone in Australia, and find out. They've all kept me in the dark for far too long.

Or I can make use of Muggle connections. Not every bit of magic requires a wand. All I have to do is to find their track in the ether of the electronic world of money. That might give a hint as to whether they're healthy or not, sane or not … a hint. At this point, a hint will suffice.

That shouldn't be too difficult; no more difficult, I would imagine, than conjuring the Wilkins couple out of nothing in the first place. As long as they're all right, I will feel somewhat better about the possibility of Plan B, what we would have gone with had Voldemort won.

* * *

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Saturday night, or early Sunday morning**

I never thought I would write this sentence, but I have a great deal of fellow-feeling for Draco Malfoy just now. I'm staring into the pit and thinking a great deal about _last things._ Things have shifted rather a lot in the last thirty-six hours, between Saturday morning and Saturday night, Hermione time.

I'm remembering Neville's Gran quoting Omar Khayyam, or FitzGerald's version of him, by her fireside.

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,  
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou  
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--  
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Substitute the Lancashire moors for the wilderness, good English ale for the wine, and that would be the idyll I dreamed when I reached up to kiss Neville, and flinched away at the last minute. Flinched, as I always have, from committing myself… ever since the disaster with Ron. Amortentia isn't required for making a fool of oneself. Adrenalin will suffice. And there's the unanswered question of the silver and onyx clasp—a lover's gift, it would appear.

After Potions revision, I took Neville aside and asked him point-blank why Draco had given it him, _really_ why, and he blanched, and stammered, and then blushed. My heart plummeted, and I turned away before I could hear what words he would try to wrap around that reaction. I didn't want to know.

Funny that I'd sent the letter off to Viktor before that, or I'd look like the sort of Gryffindor who signed up for the Foreign Legion (or whatever this world's correspondent is) after a disappointment in love.

Some for the Glories of This World; and some  
Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;  
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,  
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

Too late for that; that drum is rumbling in my ears now, though there's little prospect of paradise, rather the contrary. Nonetheless, I will take the cash in question—a little recreation for the warrior. I did make a promise, although it's by no means an Unbreakable Vow, and the one to whom I made it is compact of bad faith, by name and birth, and he tricked me into it very like the serpent in the garden.

Which is to say, I shall be having a rather profane Sunday afternoon's diversion. There is quite enough Polyjuice left for that. After that, these episodes are at an end, because I have _work_ to do, before this golden thread I am doubling over itself comes within range of the shears of Atropos.

* * *

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Sunday night**

Dervish & Banges have on display in their closed case a rare instrument, an antique Chinese thaumaturge, lately acquired from a distinguished private collection and on loan from the Ministry. Draco was going to tell me about it, since he's the scion of a a Pureblood family with its own collection of magical artifacts—well, at least before the late dismantling of the Manor.

At any rate, that's what we planned to do _after._

That establishment stands at the other end of the High Street, and this time our escort included the Auror whose excessive zeal in the performance of her duties led to my first episode with Draco. Ironic, that.

I thought that the best thing was to make friendly conversation with her, by way of diversion, to which she was more than amenable. Her name is Addie McConnell, and it turns out that she was in training with Tonks. She knows who I am, of course—who in wizarding Britain doesn't?—and she knows Harry and Ron and Ginny, all of whom she commended in the highest possible terms.

"Nobody's going to replace Moody and Tonks," McConnell said, "but those youngsters aren't as green as they look. That Dumbledore's Army lot is something to behold. Raw, I'll grant you, but not green—and they don't hesitate to fight dirty when it's called for." She smiled before continuing. "The Weasley girl, for one. The one they're calling the Mrs. Potter that's to be. You'd think she grew up in a Dark Arts family, the way she can throw hexes—nasty combinations, too. Her mother's the one that finished the Lestrange bitch." She laughs. "Molly Prewett that was. Mostly boys in that line, but when they finally do birth a witch, she's nothing ordinary."

The other Auror, whose name I didn't catch, chimed in, "I was in the Auror office when Weasley was talking about what she'd like to do to Lucius Malfoy, and it was something to chill the blood. Started with chaining him up in the Chamber of Secrets and went worse from there. Nothing so clean as _Crucio—_some ugly stuff with knives, and a good slow finish. Glad enough when I had an urgent Owl and had to leave."

McConnell laughed, and I could feel Draco flinch and grow tense. "Well, I'll have to ask her, because that's something I'd like to hear. I have a few ideas of my own on that score." And she laughed. "Did you hear the story that's going around about Malfoy's _lovely consort_?"

It seemed a _really_ good time to change the subject, so I asked, "So you knew Tonks?"

"Merlin, yes," McConnell replied. "That girl had spirit, all right. Sirius Black's second cousin, and she announced it right there in the tea room day one, along with all her nasty Dark connections by marriage, Lestranges and Malfoys, and then she said loud and clear that she knew what they were and that's why she was an Auror. That she was the renegade daughter of a renegade daughter and that ought to be good for some luck. Her mother taught her well—she knew some hexes they don't teach at Hogwarts. And funny?—you don't know what she could do with her face. I hear she would have been a prefect at Hogwarts except that her Head of House saw no point, since it would be herself she'd be docking most of the time." She paused. "And there was nobody else I ever saw _laugh_ at Mad-Eye Moody, and make him like it. Moody said there hadn't been anybody he'd liked as much since Frank and Alice Longbottom."

She added, "A shame that Lestrange bitch is dead, because there's a whole lot of us that would queue up for a go at her after what she did to Tonks. Made us understand why Moody was on about the Longbottoms all the time, if they were even half the Aurors that Tonks was promising to be. Lestrange had herself quite a scorecard there."

I didn't ask what they meant by _having a go_ at Bellatrix, whether they meant Crucio or gang rape; from the tone, it could have been either or both. I gritted my teeth, hoping that Draco would keep his nerve through the Apparition at least. I never thought I would object to ill mention of Bellatrix Lestrange, but this was turning my stomach.

When I put my arm around him for the side-along Apparition, I could feel him trembling all over.

Into the foyer, once more the blindfold and the _Silencio,_ and then I remembered that I was sleeping off a programming marathon in my own bedroom … which left my parents' room. At least this time, mirrors were not going to be a problem; we were both acquainted with the dramatis personae of this afternoon's program.

And in any case, given the state he was in, he might not want to do this at all. I was rather sickened by what I'd heard Ginny proclaiming to the world. So this was the _distressing_ behavior Harry was hoping to discuss with me. Maybe I could move up that lunch date…

I helped him to sit down, on the bed, as it happened. He was in a bad way, for he didn't resist me at all. His teeth were chattering, nearly as loudly as when we'd encountered the Dementors in Hogsmeade.

Once relieved of the blindfold, he took off his boots, then draped himself across the bed with as sultry an expression as he could manage, which sat oddly on his dead-white face.

He said to me, with more defiance than seduction, "I'm ready when you are."

* * *

**Author's notes:** Verses quoted are stanzas XII and XIII of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Atropos: the one of the Three Fates who snips off the thread of life. Her Roman alias is _Morta,_ the one whom Tom Riddle was trying to evade.

The thaumaturge, including the description of it in the chapter to follow, is owed to A. J. Hall (see _Dissipation and Despair,_ in which a long-lost Malfoy in-law makes a timely reappearance.)

Sinead Pierce O'Halloran: readers may know the North American Minister for Magic by way of the other fic in this timeline, _In Which the Princess Rescues the Dragon._ By the principle of Chekhov's Gun, you may be assured that this will not be the last such mention.


	38. Chapter 38

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

* * *

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Sunday 22 November 1998**

Draco said that he was ready whenever I was.

I wondered if my face had been as pasty-white as his when the ghost of Bellatrix had flashed across Tonks' features.

Very well then, I told him, we could begin on the preliminaries immediately. I'd consulted the latest references, so I was more than ready.

I _was_ wondering how I was going to manage this. His pose suggested the boudoir, but his face would be more in place in the casualty ward. (As well it should; I'm not sure how I would look if someone were casually discussing torturing my father to death with knives.) I took a deep, bracing breath, and Summoned the necessaries from the other room.

I put it all down on the bedside table, including four glasses of Polyjuice. Just in case.

He looked at the array of tubes and packets. Then he stared at me and said, "I see you brought extra Polyjuice, but what's the rest of all this?"

I picked up each item in turn and explained what it was and started in on the safe-sex lecture, the one straight out of the book. This I had by heart, because I remembered my parents talking about AIDS and sexually transmitted disease before I was even old enough to understand what any of that meant. And I remembered how scared they were.

I felt better already, _imparting useful knowledge._

"Oh, Muggle stuff," he said, dismissively. "You mean you're going to _wear_ that thing—on your—" (he giggled here) "—when you—"

He was clearly feeling better as well, since he'd fallen into his comfortable habit of mocking all things Muggle—and Granger-the-swot, of course.

"Listen, Malfoy, it's for your own good." I stopped for a minute, and tried to say the next thing in a nice neutral clinical tone, without blushing over more than thirty percent of my body. "Because I don't know Neville Longbottom's sexual history."

"Oh, _please,_ Granger." He mimicked me: "Neville Longbottom's sexual history." And then he actually did fall backwards on the bed and hug himself and giggle in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. "As if there _were_ such a thing."

He was _definitely_ feeling better.

He sat up. "And anyway, you didn't make _me_ wear one of those."

I said, "Because I already had that covered." (And it's damned complicated. And I had to translate it from the French. And I don't know how to do it for males. And really, Malfoy, a condom is simpler. A _lot_ simpler.) "Do you want to play, or not?"

(There's really not much to choose between Ron and Draco, really; it's a question if you like your annoying Pureblood in tony blond or shabby-genteel ginger.)

"All right, you can wear that _thing_ if you want. But the rest of that Muggle stuff is just too disgusting and _unhygienic. _After all, there _are_ spells…"

"And you know them? And you can _teach_ them?" (He had to know that I know about his… condition. Well, one can only be discreet for so long.)

"Of _course,_ Granger," he said. And I realized that he does know that I know. In fact, he's known all along. He had to know he could get me into bed that way and no other. And if I didn't know better, I'd swear that the power imbalance is a turn-on for him. That the wild magic in the hospital wing is what grabbed his attention. That he gets off on the idea that I could zap him to kingdom come if he got out of line.

This boy is seriously sick. Though properly (as Derwent warned me) no sicker than her own Pureblood apprentices, who'd been eyeing me in a distinctly unprofessional way.

The brief tutorial turned out to be less complicated than I'd feared, because the spells in question are variants of ones we learned in Charms as early as third year. The problem with the Hogwarts curriculum is that they don't teach practical applications in a timely fashion. I mean, I wasn't getting up to mischief of that kind, but not everybody was getting their kicks in library searches or duels with Death Eaters. But since wizards don't do statistics, I'll never know how many of my schoolmates were engaging in high-risk sexual activity while I was working on the problem of holding off Ultimate Evil.

Then all that remained was the Polyjuice… and then I realized what I'd forgotten.

Clothes.

Neville is six foot two, and heavily built. I'm five-foot-five. This wasn't going to work.

Malfoy was lounging on the bed with a languorous expression somewhere between bored and mock-seductive. "What's the problem now, Granger?" he said.

"Nothing," I said. I yanked the top sheet out from under him by main force. Yes, I forget I'm a witch when I'm brassed off. And it was satisfying to hear him yelp. I stripped off, tossed the clothes on a chair, and wrapped myself in the sheet. Then I dropped the hair in the Polyjuice and waited for it to bubble and then show clear.

Oh, and it did.

Tonks was sunrise. Neville was crystal-clear and white-gold and sky-blue. _Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?_ Or to a baroque church ceiling, where you look up and lose your footing on the ground because you think you're soaring into the heavens.

I picked up the glass, still staring into the swirling depths of the potion.

Looked at Malfoy over the rim, saluted him. "Drink to me only with thine eyes," I said.

Then I downed it, remembering Malfoy's technique when he took the dose: relax your throat and dump it down in one go, engaging the taste buds as little as you can. No matter how lovely it looks, it always tastes like hell.

And I screamed this time, I think, because turning into Bellatrix was _nothing _compared to turning into Neville. My face melted, my bones dissolved in fire, the room spun, and I won't speak of what my guts were doing. Polyjuice pain is about _rearrangement, _I think: you're smashing one architecture to make another.

When I straightened up, the first thing I noticed was that the room seemed slightly smaller. Or lower, anyway. I'd never been this tall. It was definitely a different perspective.

And across the room was a mirror. And in that mirror was…

Neville, wrapped in a sheet. And I felt immediately embarrassed for him, because I didn't ask him before I did this. He turned red in answer, and looked at me pleadingly. I opened my mouth to speak, and realized that I was him. Yes, that's what I had said yes to, and I was borrowing his body without permission, and I was about to…

…keep staring. It was a feedback loop; the more I stared, the more I blushed (he blushed) and now I was feeling my body (his body?) respond to my interest (yes, I was attracted to him, except I was him, but the body didn't know the difference; it just did what it does when it's interested). What was happening was something I shouldn't look at, so I closed my eyes. Except I still knew what was going on, because I could feel it.

I held on to the sheet. Funny. I remember Harry berating us after the last official Polyjuice incident about how we were far more careless of his modesty than he'd have liked, but now I was being more careful… well, it was Neville, and I hadn't asked his permission, and…

I kept staring. My thoughts were stammering. If I were alone, I knew what might happen; I might have just kept staring until I dared myself to drop the sheet and look. I'd been looking. I knew I'd been looking. I'd been stealing little glances and then there was what happened on that weekend at Neville's Gran's.

Oh yes, and the other thing I noticed about this body—was power. Fire in the bones. I remember someone on the telly talking about 'fire in the belly' but that's transient. This was in the bones; it was old rage, tamped down to a furnace glow and fueling the whole thing. Old rage, old sorrow, forest muck crushed down to coal and then to diamond. There's a part of Neville's soul that's diamond-hard.

What else I knew: if I kept looking I would explode—burst into flame—flare into pure energy...

As it was, I was feeling raw arousal poking up through the old rage, yes and some of that old rage was toward the thin blond boy on the bed who had gotten up now, smiling, and was very deliberately walking toward me, undoing the top two or three fastenings on his dark robes, unfastening the layers beneath. He let the robes slip down one shoulder and pushed me down into the chair and then sat on my lap.

Where did he learn that particular move? It was pure cliché, caught somewhere between ancient Hollywood and the floating world: he was looking at me sidelong over one bared shoulder, from under languid eyelids.

I didn't trust myself to talk. I had borrowed Neville's body without permission—as if I'd asked permission from Tonks (who's dead) or from Draco (who is, well, Draco. Oh, that's an interesting distinction, isn't it?) _Manipulative little shit_ (and I groaned as he shifted his hips, making it all too clear why he was sitting here). I would have liked to be here alone doing what I didn't dare to do when I first collected this hair, which is to say I would have liked to be getting acquainted with this body—except that I really wanted to get acquainted with it only with its original owner inside.

… Except it was plain to me that I'd never be offered the opportunity to do that in real life, and this wasn't real anyway, however real it might seem. _I'm not on the list._ That hurt, and I cherished the hurt because it justified, somehow, what I was about to do, what I'd already done.

I put a hand on the back of Draco's neck to signal him to be still, but he took it in the very opposite sense, arching into it and rubbing up against me. I saw how large my hand was. The grip didn't wrap all the way around to the front, no, I couldn't close my fingers around his throat single-handedly but with two hands I could have managed it.

"So you fancy our Neville too, do you?" said Draco.

The tone, and the utter familiarity, the _trust_ with which his body was moving against mine, his palpable confidence that I would do him no harm, made it quite clear that he had done more than _fancy_ Neville.

I wanted to slap him, and there was nothing playful about it. _You little bastard, _I thought. _Behind my back, you nasty piece of work. I fight the war and the post-war and save your arse from lynching and god knows what else, and you take the one thing I wanted. The one thing. Just walk in there, little pureblood prince, and make off with what I wanted and didn't dare declare for because I didn't think I was worthy. _

_Well, and I'm not on the list, which would indicate that _they_ don't think I'm worthy, either. And here I'm proving them right._

I took a deep breath and then I let it out and then I asked him, "So what is it that you want?" and it was remarkable how much the intonation sounded like Neville, not just the deep warm voice but the intention behind it, and I realized just how much Neville is restraining himself every minute of every day, how it's a miracle of his self-discipline that he has in fact not killed anyone (except for that damned snake and that was under orders).

That which I could articulate, that was mine; the fire in the bones, the slow burn, that was Neville. Draco had picked the wrong person and the wrong body and the wrong day. So he wanted to have a little taste of life before he disappeared into Azkaban—well, he'd fucking _earned_ Azkaban.

He had taken what I wanted, and then asked for more. And I had said yes, because I had promised—as if any promise to him ought to be binding, for he's rightly named, is Draco Malfoy, a double-dealing reptile if I ever saw one. Fool that I am, or was: my sentimental avatar of two weeks ago actually had agreed to get him his three wishes, yes, love—well, physical love—the NEWTs (which aren't in my power, for it's McGonagall who'll see to that), and a jaunt to London (which now lies in the hands of Neville, the real one I mean).

A jaunt to London: young master _Toujours Pur_ slumming it amongst his racial inferiors.

_My_ London. Capital of _my_ side of the country, the Muggle majority. _Yes, I understand why they wanted to burn you people; I don't answer for what I'd do with gasoline and a match just now, Malfoy. Nobody ever did anything for me in your world but try to kill me, and now you whine to me for mercy as if I gave a shit what happened to you. You stood by and watched me being tortured._

I had thought the rage had gone away after I broke down in the Pensieve on Thursday. I thought I'd gotten over it when I came home—no, correction, came back to Hogwarts—and fell into a deep sleep in my little cupboard in the apprentices' wing. Oh no, I'm not home. I'm not even home now. I'm living in exile. I work two jobs and one of them involves walking around in my own and others' nightmares to pay off the debt from a stupid half-assed rogue operation that would have gone a hell of a lot more easily if there had been actual adults involved.

I missed Tonks bitterly and I missed her all the more bitterly for yesterday's assignation with someone who was almost her. And I wanted to cry but couldn't, because this body was locked up tight, it was fire under rock, and I didn't know what would happen if Neville cried—cried just now, I mean, cried as an adult man who'd lived through a war. The once I saw his tears, recently, was terrible… He'd cried a lot when he was younger and caught all manner of ridicule for it, not least from the …

... the brat who was grinding into my lap.

I found I was baring my teeth; I saw a glimpse in the mirror. And the one in my lap was breathing heavily already.

_Oh no you don't_, I thought. _I will not be manipulated. You've done quite enough. _

I picked him up around the waist—how I loved being this strong!—and threw him onto the bed; he narrowly missed cracking his head against the bookshelf just behind the pillows.

To my surprise, he laughed in delight.

"Oh, you're going to play rough!" he said, kneeling up on the bed like a kid and _bouncing_.

I asked him again, but this time it came out more as a growl. "So what is it that you want?"

He smirked and his eyes lit with mischief, as if he were playing a game. "You know."

I didn't know, and I said so. He smirked, and licked his lips. "Spank me and tie me up."

I almost burst out laughing. _What a cliché,_ _the kinky aristocrat who wants things done to him._ Except I never would have suspected Draco Malfoy … no, I could speak of my _suspicions _onlyif I'd spent even five minutes wondering about his sexual kinks, or for that matter, what he liked to eat for breakfast, which I hadn't.

I lunged for him, and he evaded me; I tackled him and pinned him to the bed, at which he laughed and cursed and wriggled and pretended defiance; he'd plainly forgotten who I was, or he would have goaded me with _Mudblood_ rather than _Squib._

_Let him not mention Neville's parents, or I will kill him._

Luckily, he didn't; after _Squib,_ and _duffer, _it was all a recitation of how I didn't dare _touch_ him…

Then once I had begun, he kept giving me directions when he wasn't turning around to admire it, wriggling his bum and demanding another slap, which had the double effect of infuriating me and arousing me. He wanted this, and by now I wanted to hurt him, but what I was doing was plainly getting him excited (the evidence of that was prodding my leg), which _really_ made me want to hurt him…

I knew this had to be a bad combination, rather like alcohol and firearms. I know there are people who play these games for fun but I suspect that I should _never_ touch them—least of all with Draco.

Then, as if by the livid glare of lightning, I _knew_ what I should have suspected, at least, when I saw that ornamental clasp in Neville's hair. I'd been asked to impersonate Neville and to play those games, because Neville had already turned him down. The arrangement truly was symmetric: I was being asked to give him what he could not have in real life.

What he thought was safe to ask of me, because as is well known, I am ridiculously rule-abiding and ethical and thoroughly, Mugglishly, moral. _Yes, Malfoy, I'm as moral as the average Muggle—which should strike terror into your heart._

When I finally took him, he was tied to the bed (magical bonds, some sort of dense webbing, which he could not undo); he had shivered in delight when I cast the spell, a variant of _Incarcerus _I hadn't known until he prompted me_;_ that told me he'd rehearsed this scenario in his mind for months if not years. He was so taken with it that he forgot to smirk when I paused to make sure of our protection; he shivered again, eyes closed, when I took hold of his legs.

I had studied this part very carefully, but after a while I didn't need to remember the instructions, which I had so carefully memorized. The body that was not mine took over, and the rage that belonged to my heart and its bones—and after the careful preliminaries, I was slamming into him. He was making apprehensive and then delighted sounds, and then it was over … all over the sheets of the parental bed.

I Vanished it without thinking; I wanted _no evidence_ that I had done this here. It was only that I was sleeping in the other room, recovering from a programming bout, that I was using this room at all.

It was enough that I was looking at his face, whose expression I could not read, because it had relaxed from the feral rictus of pain and unbearable pleasure that had squeezed his eyes shut and bared his sharp white teeth. His final aria, this time, had ended in an unearthly shriek, at which I'd felt a twinge of pleasure in my gut—no, in my soul—that I had made him hurt, because it infuriated me that he'd so enjoyed that which had ruined my chances with Neville permanently.

_As if I'd ever had a chance in the first place._

Best to be honest; I'd rather be fucking a Pureblood who made no pretense that I'm _his own kind,_ or _marriageable,_ or any such rot, who never had lectured me about being the next Dark Lord…

The nasty voice in my head thought he'd be tied up soon enough and _not_ enjoying it. Knew, or was fairly certain, that he'd be sitting in the chained chair. Wondered what sentence would be read to him from there. _He wished me dead, once, loudly and publicly. He licked his lips at the idea of Umbridge torturing me, and then stood by while his aunt did it in earnest. _

_I just finished fucking the enemy, and he liked it. I wanted to hurt him, and instead all I managed was to give him a very good time._

I could see the Dark Mark on his left forearm from this angle, and I couldn't help staring at it. _That's who this is. However he felt about it later, he took it voluntarily._

He saw me staring, and tried to pull his arm back to hide the Mark, except of course he couldn't. I didn't release the bonds; I just hulked over him, staring at it. Never had I hated anyone so powerfully in my life, nor so powerfully wished I could cry… but this body wouldn't let me, and I didn't want to show that feeling in front of this _creature_ …

_Let him think I mean to kill him now. He might not be half wrong._

His complacent smirk gave way to inquiry and then to fear. His pale eyes widened, and his mouth opened a little; and then I realized that the brightness of his glance was unshed tears, and his mouth was trembling from the question he didn't dare to ask: _what are you going to do to me?_

I released him, finally, because I didn't want to hear him whine and I didn't want to see his tears. Turnabout is fair play, they say, but even on his face … that look of terror, no, that sickened me because it mirrored the thing inside me; _I had become darkness in turn…_

He sat up on the bed, rubbing his wrists. The bruises were starting to bloom. When he got up, I see the blood spot where he had been sitting. I was sick and light-headed now, coming down off the adrenalin high of lust and fury, and realizing what I'd just done.

"You're bleeding."

He shrugged. "Well, I was supposed to, wasn't I?" To my immense shock, he smiled—in a lopsided, happily exhausted way that might have been sexy if I didn't know that he was simply drunk on endorphins.

He thought I'd just given an _admirable performance._

I opened my mouth to deliver the clinical lecture about how losing one's virginity—either way—results in blood only if one's partner is inept and callous … and nothing came out. I had not been inept; callous, yes, and perhaps a bit out of control, no, very much out of control, because he had been goading me, and I hadn't reckoned on the reserves of tamped-down fire in this borrowed frame.

In any case, how could I begin to correct the barbarous sexual ignorance that is Draco Malfoy?

And then a cold bolt of horror went through me at the epidemiological implications, as I imagined him trawling Muggle London or Manchester or Brighton for rough trade (the role he'd just asked me to play) and bringing back god knows what …

How long would it take AIDS to wipe out the wizarding world? Unwillingly I remembered Neville reciting the list of that to which magical folk are _not_ immune: "Smallpox, bubonic plague, the whole horror house…"

He'd enjoyed being taken by a Power, ravished by a force of nature—and wrapped in this body, I looked the part; those bared teeth and that glower, that I'd never seen on Neville's face, the scars of battle and the sheer _size _looked thunderous and terrifying. But I'd left him with bruises, and what a forensic nurse would describe as injuries consistent with sexual assault; he refused the healing spell I offered, and I realized that I'd just set up the physical evidence for Neville to be accused of rape, under a particularly heinous scenario: the violation of someone under his care.

_Oh no you don't, _I thought, and as he stretched out on the bed to smile at the ceiling, I gathered my intent.

He stretched out his arms and looked at the bruises on his wrists, as if he had done something clever. He flexed his feet and wiggled his toes; he twisted to look at the red marks still on his rump. He yawned, shivered a little, wriggled and arched his hips, pulling his robes down to cover himself once more. He looked at me and smiled, his gaze slightly unfocused, and I was reminded of a baby playing with its toes.

I cast the healing spell, and he looked at me with mild indignation, as if I'd spoiled the last of a treat he'd mostly finished.

I felt the reverse transformation before I saw it, and sat down on the bed to steady myself; I thought that probably I shouldn't be standing when my six-foot-two frame rearranged itself down to five-foot-five.

_Neville is nine inches taller than I am. He outweighs me by at least seventy pounds. _I had noticed, of course, that he wasn't a round little boy any more, but I'd never thought about the violence he could wreak. I had felt the seductive appeal of physical violence, of sheer stone-age meat-head _force, _and I wondered how often Neville felt it, in the presence of this slight, pale, insolent creature_._

_No, probably I should be lying down_, I thought. I nudged Draco to budge over and I lay down on the bed, stared up at the textured plaster on my parents' bedroom ceiling. Closed my eyes as my bones and flesh rearranged, although the transformation back is never as painful as the outbound journey.

On reawakening as myself, I heard my name. "Granger."

I turned my head. He was looking at me, lying on his back next to me at arm's length, only his head turned toward me. From above, no doubt, we looked like an Egyptian frieze. "You don't love me."

I was so staggered by this amazingly stupid piece of understatement that I almost laughed. _I tolerate you, Malfoy. Once in a while I actually think of you by first name. I don't think I want someone else to torture you, but some days I wonder if that's because I want to reserve that privilege for myself. God help me. Though to my credit, when I tore you open just now, at least I wore protection. So if my Polyjuice avatar was carrying something blood-borne, you probably won't get it. Two cheers for safer sex._

I looked at him. He'd closed his eyes and he was breathing softly.

Then, with nearly unbearable tenderness, he whispered, "Do you want me to be Neville for you?"

I should have said no. _But I'll never have a chance in real life._

I got up and I put the hair in the potion. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. "And you have one of those Muggle things for me to wear?" he said, glass in hand. _He's humoring me by observing a primitive Muggle custom. _I nodded. He shrugged his robes over his head and hung them over the chair, smoothing out the layers. _Expensive fabric, no doubt, all of it._

As before, he lifted the glass to me before downing it in one go, and smirked—before his face and body collapsed in agony. The scream that came out of him pulled me right back to the one pouring out of my throat at Easter, in his house. For a moment I thought I must have made a mistake—was this poison?—but then I remembered _it's all the same batch, you idiot, you measured itself out yourself_. He had fallen on the floor curled into a ball. The screaming was inhuman and I was thankful for the soundproofing and the perimeter defenses that deflected attention and I was _very_ glad we were not doing this at Hogwarts.

If this didn't end in thirty seconds, though, I was going to grab him and haul us downstairs and Apparate back to Hogsmeade and take my chances with all authorities temporal and sacred, because I would not have him die on the floor there in my parents' house.

It didn't matter about Azkaban, because I'd already joined the damned…

And then who got up from the floor, naked and drenched in sweat, was Neville. (No, I wasn't looking, really; I averted my eyes but couldn't help what I saw in my peripheral vision… whether love or lust, it didn't matter, being hopeless, but the lines and curves were gorgeous.)

He smiled at me, softly and ruefully.

"I'm sorry," he said.

The nonspecific apology was _very_ Neville, and therefore heartbreaking.

He sat down next to me and put an arm around me and bent to kiss me. I had not kissed Neville in life, not a real kiss. I almost had, a week ago, but …

I never kissed Tonks in life. I hugged her goodbye, once. The last time. I think I must have known it was the last time. I had been missing chances all my life.

This was just pretend. It was a fantasy, not real. I had to be very careful never to act as if it really happened with Neville. Certainly never let on to the original that I already know him in the flesh… not that this ever would be a possibility.

He lay down and drew me down to him. "Hermione." He kissed my throat.

It was a fleshly daydream played by a talented actor who knew his original, whose sharp eye and ear had been without mercy in mimicking me and everyone I know, for years and years. This was the first time I think he had ever used his gift mercifully. My anthropological brain inquired if there were a caste of Polyjuice whores who made a trade of impersonating the beloved dead: sacred prostitutes who eased the bereaved through mourning. Because I knew now that Tonks was dead, and Neville beyond my reach. I'd ruined it, but it was never going to happen.

I was very, very careful with the spell to prevent pregnancy.

And then, as with all masterful performances, I forgot that it was a performance and I took hold of it and I followed it as if it were real, as his arms enfolded me and my bare skin met his, as I felt the separation between us close, as we were separated _only by our skins._

I followed it, passionately, not even trying to hold back the tears or the kisses, the tears which flowed of their own accord even through the awkward stage business with the condom, through the re-entry to bliss, hot satin landscape moving under me like an earthquake, and what I must have said, what I can't remember even now, what I said to the one who wasn't him, at the very last, and then the embarrassed, desultory conversation afterward…

To the very end. Where it was no longer Neville but the other one.

He said, "You made love to him. You made love to her, and you wouldn't even tell me who she was. You _fucked_ me." His voice caught in a sob. "And you won't even call me by my name."

The mood swings made me dizzy. What did he _want_? Or was he simply as mad as I?

I replied, "You never asked me to do that, Draco."

"Who is she, then?" he asked. "Because she felt familiar. I _liked_ being her. If I were a girl, I'd like to be her." He added, "And I think she liked you. Or would have liked you, if you'd asked her." He was driving knives into my heart. "So why did you use me? Why didn't you just ask her?"

"Because she's dead," I said. "In the war." I shouldn't have done this, but I twisted the knife. "Bellatrix Lestrange killed her. Yet another thing I have that bitch to thank for. So it's an impossible love." I added, "I don't suppose you ever had one of those."

He smiled, an odd wistful little smile the likes of which I have never seen on his face. "Actually, I did."

I was incredulous, and the question was out of my mouth before I could stop it. "Who was she?"

He said, "A girl in a portrait." He smiled. "In the common room. Group portrait of the best Slytherin house team of all time. _Not_ a photograph. A painting, so they talk to you."

"I thought you lot didn't have girls on your house team."

"Not now. But then…" he dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. "She flirted with me. When I was eleven and twelve and thirteen. I didn't know it was flirting at first. It just made me feel nice." He smiled. "She said, 'Oh look, it's a little Malfoy. What's your name, little Malfoy?' so I told her, and she said, 'You're the handsomest one yet.'"

I remembered that his father and grandfather and probably great-grandfather had been in Slytherin as well, and wondered which one it was she'd known in life. "So what was her name?"

"It said on the plate, Emily Chattox. Hogwarts class of 1911. She played Beater—can you imagine that? I knew scarcely any girls who even _played Quidditch_."

_Emily Chattox. Ye gods, this is a small world. Does he know she's related to Neville?_

"And then I asked Father about her and he got _very_ icy and said I wasn't to ask about her because she had done something unbecoming a Pureblood witch and then gotten mixed up in some Muggle business."

"So what was it she did?"

"He wouldn't say." He looked sad. "She might be dead. You can get _killed _ in Muggle ruckus. Like that thing that happened in London in the time of Grindelwald. With all those flashes and bangs." It took me a minute before I realized that Draco was describing the Blitz.

"So does she still talk to you?"

"No." He looked shamefaced. "She stopped when she heard me say 'Mudblood.'"

"And it took until you were thirteen for her to hear you say that?"

"Mostly we talked about Quidditch."

Let me not forget the weird part. There were, after all, two more glasses of Polyjuice, and this was our last hurrah.

Now that he was in a reminiscent mood, he told me a story about Pansy. Or rather, about Pansy's hair, and how she refused to grow it out or otherwise modify it from the Theda Bara bob she loved. Even after he'd taken her over to the shadowy end of the Slytherin common room to which someone had moved the picture back in the forties. Even after he'd pointed out Emily and how she did _her_ hair.

I never thought I'd take up for Pansy Parkinson, but this was too much. "Could you have been any less subtle, Malfoy? You all but told her you had a thing for the girl in the picture and would she please act out your fantasy."

"Pot, kettle, Granger. And I thought you were going to call me Draco."

Then I noticed he was eyeing the glasses of Polyjuice on the bedside table, and he noticed me noticing and said, "I want to do that thing you did with Krum."

"What are you talking about?" I said.

"The body swap," he said.

"You made that up," I said. "That's your _idea_ of what I did with Krum."

What I did with Viktor (which is no one's business but our own) was a private seminar on Advanced Techniques in Osculation. For all that we were not each other's one true love, it still stands as one of the sexier experiences of my life, as does the extended correspondence which followed (in English, French, Bulgarian, and Latin—and the spiciest bits were in Latin) that was sexiest of all when we were talking about something technical, that had nothing to do with sex.

He won't let it drop. "So what position did he like best?" I rolled my eyes. The thing I have learned about Draco Malfoy's interrogation technique is that he will try to wind you up with some outrageous version of things in the hope that you'll indignantly blurt out the truth. I ignored him and got on with business.

"Ow!" He rubbed his head; I dropped the hair I'd just plucked into the first glass of Polyjuice and set it aside. I plucked one of my own and dropped it into the other glass, which I handed to him. As soon as the potion finished boiling and swirling, we clinked glasses and downed it.

Of the Polyjuice transformation, I'll say only that it's unpleasant enough without having Draco's high-pitched screaming in your ear at the same time. Yes, I already know he has a low threshold for pain. The little yelps and squeaks and squeals are entertaining, and I imagine one could form the habit of startling him or pinching him on the bum just to hear them. But the screaming is in excess of what a lover should be asked to endure.

As soon as he was in his new body—_my body—_he hopped off the bed and started doing outrageous things with it in front of the mirror. He was particularly fascinated with the breasts (I was going to say "my breasts," but they weren't. He definitely had custody of them.) And no, it was not sexy; it was ridiculous and annoying, like listening to a nine-year-old who's just discovered fart jokes. Finally I had to remind him that this was a time-limited event and if he wanted to do it we should bloody well do it now. And then he had the nerve to tell me I was spoiling the mood.

By then it was dark out and I was exhausted and hadn't eaten in hours. I cast the spells on him that I was rather more used to casting on myself, and gave him a quelling look as he half-opened his mouth to say something flippant and stupid. Wisely, he clamped it shut, or I might have hexed it off his face.

I was trying to enjoy the experience, though truthfully, the most I managed was a first draft of the thought, "I'm screwing a Pureblood aristocrat who's disguised as my own Mudblood self, in the Muggle bed in which I was conceived. Hey, and I'm fairly sexy if I do say so myself. It's not half bad having sex with me" which was more or less immediately pre-empted by "—except these boy bits are not functioning."

This difficulty was immediately noticed by my attentive if not considerate partner, who told me that I was letting down the side. In _his_ body no less, which worked out to some kind of vicarious insult to his family honor. I'm _still_ not sure about tying him up, but gagging him was looking like a really attractive idea.

Oh yes, Granger, you're a witch, remember?

_Silencio._

It really wasn't sporting, but after that he got the idea.

I released him from the hex as soon as I recovered my temper.

And I remembered that there were, after all, alternatives to the usual, including what I'd spent part of yesterday doing with him under the guise of Tonks. So I did that, and then he reciprocated—with what I think he was thinking when he did for me yesterday. Very good, very practiced, and my suspicions were confirmed, as if all the rest hadn't already confirmed them.

He's been doing that with—for—on—someone else. _Someone male. _A lot. And recently. Though the watcher high in the tower in the back of my head was laughing herself sick, because from where she sat it looked like the ultimate act of narcissism. After all, he was doing me, disguised as him.

Afterward, I looked at him and thought that I really ought to Obliviate him. Really, for he had the means to blackmail me, to ruin … all that I've worked for, that's completely meaningless because I'm nothing more than the slave who's redeeming the worthless Ministry from the Goblins. I'm nothing, really. I'm already serving a life sentence. I don't think the trials are going to make a difference in _my_ fate. They are treating me kindly just now to get more work out of me.

And then I remembered the hapless Muggles Obliviated by the Aurors at the Quidditch World Cup, who remembered … not even the day it was.

Derwent rated me for my ignorance in the elaborate charm I cast on my parents… which was a great deal more complicated than _Obliviate._

_Obliviate_ is simple. It's cast every day …

… on _Muggles,_ on the people the Aurors, and the Ministry that employs them, considers the enemy. Translate that: I am Muggle-born, which is to say, _enemy-born._

I could cast it on Draco Malfoy, and solve my problem in one swoop. Easy.

Ah yes, except for the small matter that Draco Malfoy is under medical supervision… by Boudicca Derwent. _Noted expert in spell damage, who knows more than anyone in wizarding Britain about memory charms. _I've seen his file, after all.

_Let me not be a fool._

I looked him in the eyes, those transparent grey eyes that lately had been looking at me (no, not me, but a simulacrum of Neville) with lust, and then with terror, and then with satisfaction, and I said very deliberately, "You cannot speak. You must keep faith."

He blinked, and then only half-indignantly said, "You put me under Fidelius."

It's not the Latin, after all; it's the intent.

Then he smiled, a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile that unnerved me. "You should have been Sorted into Slytherin," he said.

"I don't think so. Pureblood private club, remember? No Mudbloods need apply." To my surprise, he winced at the word with which he once had been so free.

* * *

I realize, belatedly, that I have no idea who he is. I thought I knew him, but he's changed. I've never paid attention to him, not really. He's never really been a _person,_ not a real one. For so long, he's been a feature of the landscape, just one of the nastinesses of this place—something in my peripheral vision, that I should watch lest it prove dangerous. For six years, every word out of his mouth has been a warning of just where I stood.

The angel with the flaming sword, if you will. But that's much too romantic.

He's nothing, really. A failure. He pulled off one spectacular hack, and that in fear for his parents' lives. Politically, he's the worst sort of damaged goods. The true and full account, the one that will be played in court, makes him out a dithering coward who couldn't make a clean break with the wrong side in time to make any kind of difference. They will make sure that the impression is indelible. Even if by some miracle they don't send him to Azkaban, nothing else he ever does will redeem him from disgrace, and he won't have the wealth to create the appearance of virtue through judicious donations.

He's nothing. Less than nothing. Damaged goods.

And for myself?

There are two of me: the one who knows the rules and cares for justice, and the one who is utterly ruthless in getting what she wants; there's the demon of jealousy, and the beast howling for blood. I don't know which is awake at any given moment, even when I'm dressed in my own flesh and bones. Until I can tell, I had best not fool with shifting into any shape but my own.

In any case, I'm done with that, and know in my own bones why it is forbidden. Not that it matters, for the game is played out. We are done with love, and lust, and all mortal foolishness. All that remains is the endgame.


	39. Chapter 39

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

* * *

**Sunday 22 November 1998**

**Hogsmeade and Hogwarts**

What just happened, of course, didn't happen, because in an eyeblink, after turning that blind corner and winking out, they're back, though Hermione is now desperately hungry and looking forward to the midday meal rather more than when she set out.

And now, in Dervish & Banges, they're leaning on the glass case, and, true to his promise, Draco is telling her about the amazing confection of bronze and glass enclosed therein. It looks a bit like an astrolabe, with its toothed curves, but bronze dragons writhe over it, their talons grasping for purchase on those metal cusps… yes, she looks closely, they do in fact move, their eyes lighting a little as they turn to regard the watchers.

"It's the same magic that makes photographs recognize you," he says.

"And if someone non-magical looked at it, what would they see?"

He looks at her oddly. "Well, bronze dragons, and glass… and they _might_ see them move. It's why we have to be discreet." They lean against the glass, and under cover of his voluminous cloak, his hand takes hold of hers and squeezes—almost as if he were pledging something.

Of course, she has to remind herself who this is.

_For measuring the strength and direction of magical fields, in fortifications and ceremonial places_, the label says. The artifact is dated to 1000-1100 C.E. (Wizards are relentlessly secular, she remembers.)

"There's one like this in the collection at the Manor," he says, adding in a low voice, "if this isn't in fact the one from the collection at the Manor."

"It's as old as Hogwarts," she says.

"My family is at least that old," he says.

She turns and looks at him. "So is my family." Takes in the surprise in those pale eyes, and adds, "My mother had a mother and father, and they had mothers and fathers… and the same for my father. And so on backward, time out of mind." She looks at him. "We just don't have a Manor."

"That was it, wasn't it?" he whispers. "Where we were. Your family's house."

It's not quite a kick she administers to his shin, more an aggressive nudge. (This is not going to be easy…)

"So," she says aloud, "can you read the writing on it? I don't read Chinese." Adds, aggressively, "_Not yet_." Though it's feeling a lot like bravado at this point, the idea that there will be time, ever again, to do things she might like to do, such as learn Chinese, or study mathematics, or walk about under the sky of some foreign place, such as Australia…

He says, "No, but it's probably Necromancers' Mandarin in any case."

She looks at the instrument in the case, its prisms throwing rainbow light and its dragons writhing as they climb over the toothed gears. "You know some interesting things," she says.

He smiles a very slight smile, with eyes downcast and pale lashes glittering in the winter light from the windows. On any other face, that expression would be modest acknowledgment; on his face, it's … an enigma.

It's not until they're back in the apprentices' corridor, their escort returned to ordinary duties, that he asks her which of his things she would like. In particular, the broom…

She frowns. It feels far too much like quid pro quo, and that she doesn't like. The bargain was enough in itself, and she says so.

"No," he says, "Not now. When they sentence me." Under that, she can hear what he really means, _when they shut me away forever_.

It's an awkward question; she had no idea she was in anyone's last will and testament, leave alone…

"Who else is there?" he says. "Neville wouldn't want it and there's … no one else." (What he doesn't say: all of his friends are dead or disappeared.) He says, "You could make good use of it, if you promise to practice. You could be almost acceptable…"

She's not the only one setting her affairs in order.

* * *

**Thursday 26 November 1998**

**12:00pm, at the Ministry for Magic**

Thursday noon, and she's debating whether to set up another query to run through the lunch hour, when suddenly Derwent is standing behind her and saying, "You can do that after lunch. Your friend is here."

She starts and catches herself before she topples the rack of memory vials. Harry smiles at her, though it looks tentative—he's not quite sure of his welcome, _as well he shouldn't_, she thinks, _as if I cared any more_.

It's the Leaky Cauldron, of course, and there's Hannah Abbott, pink-faced and pigtailed, who brings them their pints—Harry waves off Hermione's objection; they _are_ going to have butterbeer with lunch, and a hearty lunch it is too.

He's drinking his, and looking at her over the rim. Oddly, she remembers that conversation they had months ago, a few weeks after her birthday, though of course it's a very long time in her timeline: four months? six? She must confess she doesn't keep track.

Harry puts the matter plainly. "I'm worried about Ginny."

Hermione says, somewhat heartlessly for all she's eating food he paid for: "So you said."

_Not that he worried particularly when I went off the rails, _she thinks. _Of course, I fake it well. But one's friends aren't supposed to be taken in. _

"She's talking about things she oughtn't. In public."

"In the Auror tea room," Hermione says, "about skinning alive Malfoy senior, or some such. In any case, I hear it at Hogwarts."

Harry frowns.

"Some of your colleagues quite approve. They repeat it in front of his son." Harry has the grace to look discomfited. "Yes, and we all know it's Draco bloody Malfoy, as you have him, but it's his _father_ they're talking about. I cut them off before they could say anything about his mother,…" Harry frowns. "Yes, I know he made fun of your parents dying. Ginny, on the other hand, ought to know better."

Harry shakes his head. "She's not herself. She's … odd." He says, "There was the once on the Hogwarts Express, she told Neville that he shouldn't call himself 'nothing much.' And then… " He looks at the plate, and the forkful of shepherd's pie he's left alone all this time. "When he came to talk to her, _she_ said it to him."

She's proud of herself, that she doesn't feel even a shiver… though she does, as if a knife hurt her ghost, in a room a hundred years ago, or a hundred years from now… before she was born or after she's dead.

Ginny is destroying everything around her…

… just as she has, having firmly shut the door so she that she can concentrate on the task at hand. But that's different. Ginny still belongs to the world of the living, about which she should have some care.

Harry says, "Percy keeps pointing things out that aren't right." He puts down the drink and stares at his hands. "She won't stay away from McConnell, she won't stop talking about the Malfoys, and she won't make an appointment with Derwent."

"McConnell. That wouldn't be Addie McConnell?"

Harry nods.

Hermione sighs; she hasn't relinquished this world entirely, if a good problem can still pull her in. "That's the one who was telling me what Ginny was saying in the Auror tea room. So is she the only one talking like that?"

"No, but she's the loudest."

* * *

**Thursday 22 November 1998**

**5 p.m. at the Ministry for Magic**

The list of things to do has proliferated, and she's running out of locked rooms.

**_Continue work on the War Crimes archives._** One job of many. The work is a little less fascinating now that they've worked out the last of the technical kinks and she's had a chance to contemplate what they've collected. It certainly looks like population surveillance. The blood status paperwork from the Thicknesse Ministry is in the queue for entry into alleged war crimes archives, unlike the full record of the atrocities.

**_Cross the border and work at the bank._** Easy enough, if she didn't have to dodge Nigel, who has become something of a pest. She suspects he's dangling after a date to the Christmas party, the one (or one of many) to which lowlies like herself are not invited. Aren't there plenty of girls in London who would find him an acceptable escort? And he's hinting around that he knows someone who knows her. Unlikely, unless he really is kin to the Black Family of Grimmauld Place. (No, she's not going to think about that.)

**_Figure out how to sort the Dementors._ **That's in process, and looking more and more like a suicide mission. The likelihood of learning their True Name is very slim indeed.

**_Work with the Remus Lupin Foundation._** If she can trust them, that is… but the work on the Dementor problem was inspired by their interest. The werewolf issue, they're doing a fine job sorting themselves, and she heard that Ron and Lavender were working on a briefing paper about the Statute of Secrecy.

There's a ripple, or a rumor, that the Decommissioning of Malfoy Manor has set off some sort of interest in the Muggle world… though that would be on Kingsley Shacklebolt's list of things to do, not hers.

**_Reform the Ministry._** No prayer of that. They're keeping her distracted, with the Sentient Magical Creatures or Entities or whatever committee, and the War Crimes Commission, and the fact that they're amassing a monster database on wizarding Britain while pretending this has anything to do with the War Crimes trials, which have precisely two major defendants: Lucius Malfoy and Dolores Umbridge, with some number of accessory Malfoys—Narcissa and Draco—by way of decoration. Everyone knows this; she knows it, Derwent knows it, Harry knows it, Neville doesn't even bother telling her that he knows it because she knows that he knows it, and it goes without saying that Rita-bloody-Skeeter knows it. Except there's still the nagging possibility that they might indict poor Percy Weasley, as assistant to the late Minister.

**_Revise for the NEWTs._** Yes, that's going well, if she can keep riots from breaking out. Draco Malfoy needs to remember that he's a Slytherin: subtle, stealthy, sinister. Other things that start with 'S.' Not stupid. Not stupid enough to _wink_ at her in Potions revision as if there were something between them. Because it's over, and she doesn't need Ron punching Draco. She is sick of playing referee to overgrown boys, and she has _work_ to do, and limited time. She is running out of locked rooms.

**_Sort things out with Griphook. _**The Goblins have an agenda, which everyone seems to ignore. If she were a Goblin, she wouldn't trust witches or wizards for _anything._ The wizards, the alleged humans, have had their own way for far too long, and that's worked out so well, hasn't it? She suspects that from Griphook's point of view, she's no different from Ron or Harry, particularly not after that business with the dragon. In any case, she has an appointment with Griphook next week. She will have to study up, in one of the diminishing number of locked rooms. She wishes once more that she spoke Gobbledygook, but then Hogwarts never was very strong on foreign languages. She's lucky to have Latin and French; that was her parents' doing (gratitude, regret and mourning scarcely feel different at this point). And the smattering of Bulgarian she owes to Viktor.

**_(If indicated, following the conference with Griphook) have it out with Bill Weasley._** Except that it just seems to her that Bill was the messenger, and she's Pensieved herself and looked at that conversation in June. Bill doesn't have power over what is happening behind the scenes, and she rather suspects the Ministry.

**_Patronus Charm trainings, regularly, up and down the British Isles._** The Ministry is very keen on the Defense Association, or rather, its remnant, although none of them are good enough—read Pureblood enough—to qualify as Aurors. Dean's eyes still light with anger when he talks about that. She doesn't care, not much anyway. She already knew she didn't want to be an Auror. Luna got the invitation, but declined; funny how Luna's philosophic indifference mirrors her own. Hermione and Dean are angry, but it's different things that incite them.

**_Do something about Ginny Weasley._** But what? Ginny has a problem. Harry paid for Hermione's lunch and a round of butterbeer at the Leaky Cauldron so he could say as much, not very helpful at all, but what did it… was finding out what Ginny had said to Neville. 'You really are nothing much.' After forbidding him that years ago, now she's saying it to him… it's as if she's possessed. And Percy has gotten involved, Percy with the 'O' in Potions, Percy who reminds her of the sixth-year Potions demo, Percy who still reproaches himself for being so much afraid of the twins that he _didn't_ sort that other mess before it ended in the Chamber of Secrets. She has a lunch date with Percy, too, in Muggle London—he won't say where, just _nice enough to cheer her up_—to which she'll be bringing her portfolio of documented disaster.

**_Wonder who's on her side._** The grownups in this world are old, and infinitely subtle, and she doubts that she understands the tangle of family alliances, even on the winning side. Speaking of which:

**_Have it out with Augusta Longbottom._** What is she about? Why try to recruit her as an apprentice—for surely that's what that cryptic conversation was, two weeks ago in the world's time—if she's racially unacceptable? For that matter, why throw her together with Neville, encourage the two of them to take walks, if she's _not on the list?_

**_Have it out with Neville._** That can be done under the point above, if only she can schedule the two of them in the same room. Well, maybe after her visit to St. Mungo's tonight. It will be best to have that concluded before the excursion to London with Draco, which has been approved by McGonagall, with herself and Neville and two Aurors by way of chaperones.

**_Have it out with Harry._** She already did that, except that now he's coming back and asking favors again, and really the only reason she's bothering is that a few hours later Percy asked her the same favor—to help him do something about Ginny—and it's Percy she owes things; he's as desperate as she, without having access to a time-turner. More than once in recent times, she's contemplated what she shouldn't: loaning him hers. Except that would solve nothing, really: there's more work to be done in the post-war than hands to do it, even if one did double one's life over and over …

Really, this belongs under a separate heading. She's losing her touch.

**_Have lunch with Percy and compare notes on the disaster of the post-war._** She admits to herself, sometimes, just how much she likes those lunches; there's a sort of cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless, in talking out the dreadful details with someone whose lot is as desperate as hers. Sometimes it feels like two friends discussing their respective Great Loves, from whom they are now estranged: for she admits it now, how much she had been in love with all things magical, the world to which she was born but born an outsider, and with which she is now disenchanted; Percy, of course, was in love with the Ministry, that maze of whimsically named departments that's as horrid as anything out of Kafka.

But then her mother had said it first: "Kafka was writing documentation." And that reminds her:

**_Find out if there's a trace of Monica and Wendell Wilkins... _**That she's begun; thus far it's promising. She's found the track, at least. They arrived, they passed immigration, there's a bank account; there's been funds passing in and out of it regularly. She won't drop down the next level of horror and think about what sinister thing could account for that reassuring pattern; there are too many scenarios. She had promised herself that she would not worry, once she found the trail.

* * *

**Thursday 26 November **

**5:30 p.m., at St. Mungo's Spell Damage**

The letter from Viktor, received this morning, is encouraging.

There is quite a literature on the Dementors, on the Continent, and the parcel that will arrive under separate cover has an introductory selection of works for those with a _practical_ interest in the problem.

(The parcel arrived yesterday, Wednesday, and it was only the shrinking and lightening charms on it that permitted a post owl to carry it at all.)

The most comprehensive writer is Athanasius Delacour—she wonders if he's any relation to Fleur—in the 1783 edition of _Natural History of the Dementor,_ _with a Necromantic and Demonological Supplement;_ two or three more anonymous Latin works from the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries; a new copy of the standard text at Durmstrang, _On the Banishing Rite,_ which Viktor and Andrei have annotated in a few places to indicate where there may be secret reference to that particular species of hive-demon.

_On the Banishing Rite_ is an excellent book, quite clear, and she grinds her teeth once more, thinking about Hogwarts' own shoddy shambles of a Defense Against the Dark Arts curriculum. She wonders how much of the blame belongs to Tom Riddle, and how much is the traditional Hogwarts way: teach the students just enough to obviate the danger of wild magic, but not enough so that they can defend themselves against the Ministry.

No wonder Draco's father wanted to send him to Durmstrang. (She _never_ thought she would agree with Lucius Malfoy on anything.)

The problem is no longer her problem alone, Viktor writes; Andrei recognized the pattern of her requests and there are others who are interested as well. There will be more books to come; the problem of the Dementor is well-studied on the Continent. The Dementors have never crossed the Channel, but it always was feared that they would. It's not only Central Europe that has a recurring problem with Dark Wizards.

That's a very polite way of saying that they've always feared a British invasion.

* * *

**Thursday 26 November 1998**

**Evening visiting hours at St. Mungo's**

Thursday night visiting hours at St. Mungo's and she's settled herself into a chair outside Spell Damage, to wait for Neville. When he arrives, wearing his heavy cloak rather than his Muggle overcoat, he looks at her in surprise—well, it's surprise, with a sort of sadness in it, as if he knows that the outcome of their conversation is going to be unhappy.

She notices that he is still wearing the silver and onyx clasp in his hair: what had been the matter of their falling-out, weeks ago. No, really only Saturday afternoon and today is Thursday, and they've both been at work all this time, but in her timeline it's been two or three weeks, as she's worked at the Ministry and St. Mungo's and then doubled back to catch another Sentient Beings committee meeting, then to live her life as a programmer in the City of London (which involves more than a little doubling-back at home to study or to get extra work done), then yet again to study the Dementor problem in her spare time, in yet another locked room. They're not locked rooms anymore, really, but the rooms of her parents' house, in which she politely ignores her earlier and later selves about their business. It's like having a multiplicity of housemates, whose habits she knows quite well… because they're all her.

Luckily, time itself has moved forward and she always doubles back in small increments, so she's seen the last of herself and Draco, ascending and descending the stairs—

The last time she saw the two of them standing in the foyer, as she blindfolded him and cast the silencing hex, she noticed that he stood passively, like a victim in front of the firing squad; his face glowed alabaster around the black blindfold, and he closed his eyes well before she tied the blindfold in place. She was struck by how little he resembled the boy she had known at school. There's something otherworldly about him now, especially in repose, as if he already has crossed over to the world of the dead.

Neville looks at her, absently pushing his thick hair back from his forehead, and turning pink… well, on Neville a blush is not quite as dramatic as on Draco; it looks like sunrise rather than the flare of high noon.

He says, "I didn't expect to see you here."

"Every Thursday," she says, "or every Thursday that I can make it." His smile wavers a little.

"You're angry," he says. He looks down. "I suppose you ought to be. There was a bit I didn't tell you…"

She says, "Did you want to talk about that before or after?" There's no question of talking about it _during,_ because his parents are all too sensitive to the currents of emotion in the room.

He tells her it doesn't matter.

"Then whichever you prefer," she says, realizing that it really doesn't matter, because either it will happen now or it will happen later; events stand outside of time, and she revisits them. It breeds an odd sort of detachment. On the other hand, cause and effect begin to feel like marble boulders in the stream… something that, once placed, direct the flow of all subsequent events.

He looks down. "After, I suppose."

She says, "And I want to talk with your Gran as well. Would it be possible to stop at your house for a bit afterward? I think I would rather it were on her ground. Not in public, I mean."

Neville looks even more apprehensive at this. "But you're not going to talk about _that _in front of her…"

She knows what _that_ he means, and she supposes not. His Gran is a daughter of the Edwardian age, after all, and it might be a bit of a shock.

"I have other business with her," she says, "but I want you to be there, because it concerns you." Gods, does she sound stiff, and a bit hostile… surely he must know.

Unexpectedly, he takes hold of both of her hands, and she's taken aback by how warm and large his hands are, and remembers those hands on her… no, those were not his hands, only someone else's disguised as his.

He says, "Hermione, are you all right? You really don't look well." She isn't sure whether the correct answer is a nod or a shake of the head, so she does neither. He says, "I'm sorry for it, anything I did… are you sure you want to do this? You really don't look well."

"I'm well enough," she says. "And we don't want to miss visiting hours."

* * *

**Visiting hours**

Neville's mother, as always, is more restless than his father; Hermione knows that her own disquiet must be communicating itself wordlessly. Neville talks to them, arranges pillows, but none of it does any good.

Finally he opens the drawer of the bedside table and takes out a comb and sits next to his mother at the bedside, his chair scooted as close to the hospital bed as possible, and begins to comb her hair. This calms her a little, and he hums a little as he's doing it, and she relaxes a little more. It's thoroughly unnecessary as grooming, of course, for the hospital staff keep the patients in the closed ward quite neat and clean; more, it's communication. She thinks about what it would be like to do that for her own mother, whose thick straight dark hair she's always envied (it's from her father that she inherited her bushy mane); and then she realizes that she must take Neville at his word when he says that his duties are easier for him than for his Gran. They're her children, after all, whom she must remember in the bloom of youthful energy, all verve and strength and cleverness.

It's when he draws the comb to the end of the strands, carefully holding his mother's thin white hair so it doesn't pull, that she flashes on Draco's carefully trimmed hair—how it had been cut so that no trace remained of the ugly sheared-off ends. Not the most elegant haircut she had ever seen; before it grew out, it had re-made him into the pointy-faced schoolboy she remembers, rather than the frightening copy of his father she had encountered immediately before the attack…

Neville had done that haircut; she knows for a fact.

Neville had been caring for Draco, much as he's caring for his parents.

The humming grows, bit by bit, into full-throated singing, with words she recognizes. His mother and father smile vaguely, swaying a little, following the rhythms. He knows a surprising number of folk songs, _Muggle_ folk songs, tragic narratives of shipwreck and heartbreak and war, that nonetheless seem to soothe them.

_The band played Waltzing Matilda…_

She never appreciated that song before, at least not as a child, that tale of the Australian veterans of Gallipolli… well, compared to them, she got off easy, she'd say: all limbs in place, no scars that show (at least not when she's fully dressed), not quite so many nightmares as the others. The moment when they thought Harry was dead—well, that gave her a taste of it; she has to imagine that moment carried forward into indefinite future. There already are enough voids that can't be filled, and she's thinking, of course, of all the dead who revisit her in her dreams, the ones she loved or liked in life, and the ones, like Professor Snape, whom she's only come to appreciate as human beings in retrospect. The ones she wanted to know and never would, like Tonks; odd how the heart fixes on what it can't have.

Odd, too, the permutations of fancy, of lust, of love…

Neville's singing voice is a fine, serviceable baritone, well suited to songs about ordinary people in extremis. Like his speaking voice, it's a storyteller's voice, deceptively ordinary, modestly calling no attention to itself so that the tale can come to the fore.

His mother's face, and his father's too, have settled into repose, and they have closed their eyes, as if it were a lullaby he had been singing and not a tale of military disaster; he smiles a little as he brings the song to a close, his voice trailing off tenderly like a last touch of fingertips…

She finds herself wiping away the tears with the back of her hand, until once more he offers her one of his spotless handkerchiefs. She smiles, a little embarrassed at being moved like that, for this time it wasn't thoughts about her parents, but the song, and the realization of just how much courage is in the love that just keeps seeing to the results of disaster, that takes the trouble to memorialize it …

If wizarding Britain ever held a veterans' parade for the First and Second Wars Against Voldemort, Neville's parents would most certainly be in it.

And in the more recent cohort would march Neville himself, with the scars on his face that he carries like campaign ribbons; Justin, whose scars are like armor, in their rigidity and coldness, and who has set out as a knight-errant to rectify injustice in a world he could leave at will; and Lavender, who has woven hers into a new sort of grace; her silver and lapis cane is the very least of it: the accoutrement of a war veteran and a beautiful woman, the silver-veined resurrection of the frivolous girl she had despised at school. _All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born. _

Not that this changes their estrangement, but the music has lifted her to a high place from which she can see them all aloft or adrift on the great waves of history.

And she does rather understand now the frivolity of falling in love with singers.

* * *

**A night walk in London**

After visiting hours, there's a moment's awkwardness about where to go next, for the conversation they've agreed to have before he goes home to his Gran, and she with him for that further conference. Their world is too narrow; the visitors' tea room at St. Mungo's won't do, nor are the Leaky Cauldron or the Three Broomsticks the place for such confidences.

By unspoken consensus, they walk out into Muggle London, and keep walking; Neville takes a moment to cast a notice-me-not, not that it's really needed in the anonymity of the city.

They walk together for a while in silence, and then Neville begins without preamble to tell the story of the clasp. A birthday present, a late birthday present; Draco had given it him after seeing Luna's present to him (the drawing _Mistletoe with Nargles_)_,_ but more especially the magnificent book that Hermione had given him.

She'd forgotten that… that sumptuous history of botanical illustration, that cost more than she'd ever spent on a book, but which (as she'd quipped) if divided by all of the birthdays on which she had not given him a present, was not extravagant at all.

Draco is childishly possessive and jealous, always, Neville says, and then goes on to tell what happened in the beginning, how it had begun with the box of sweets on his birthday… he'd been doing that for the orphaned children, and instinctively he'd included Draco in that number, since both of his parents were in Azkaban.

Neville knew that he'd been writing to them every day, sitting at that makeshift table in his quarters in the hospital wing, and he had seen the letters that came back, and how Draco read them secretively and then sat quietly, pretending to study but really staring into the middle distance—that much more pronounced after the news that the Dementors had returned to Azkaban.

On the evening of Draco's birthday, he'd had the thought to check on him, long after curfew (for Madam Pomfrey was long since used to him coming and going in the hospital wing), and found him pacing, unable to sit still, frantic at the _very worrying_ letter he'd received from his mother. That was the first night he'd asked to be held, after Neville persuaded him to lie down and try to sleep.

Neville doesn't quite know how to explain, but it was a five-year-old boy who asked him that, so he didn't hesitate: not to hold him, nor to stroke his hair because his mother had done that when he'd wake from nightmare.

It developed into ritual, eventually, and then … and then there was a night that Draco took it further.

In the neon-lit darkness she knows, from the awkward pause, that Neville is blushing. They walk on in silence, she looking everywhere but at his face, the crowds streaming by them, as they progress more or less in the direction of the gateway to the Leaky Cauldron.

Neville says that at first, it was only holding him until he calmed down, and then it was holding him until he fell asleep.

She guesses that was the beginning of the end.

Neville says, "Then, he would cuddle up, and there was once… he _noticed_ that I was … reacting_… _ and sometimes he would be asleep, or half-asleep, and I didn't want to wake him up so I held still…"

He adds, as if not quite daring to do so, "But I wasn't thinking about him…"

She remembers the Polyjuice tryst (how can she forget) and what Draco did, sitting on her lap, and she conjectured that he wasn't asleep at all when he was doing that.

Neville says it was a lapse on his own part. This was someone in his care. It's his own fault that he let himself react, because otherwise Draco would have had nothing to take advantage of.

And after Draco had his own room, and he was working on learning about life without magic …

There's another very long pause; Hermione glances over her shoulder to the illuminated towers of the City of London, behind her—that other world to which she doesn't quite belong—

Neville says, his voice trembling a little, that he had let Draco _do things_ (Hermione knows exactly what things, she's fairly sure)—but there's still the blow in the heart when he adds, with absurd Victorian indirection, _down there._

And then, after the encounter with the Dementors in Hogsmeade, suddenly Draco became quite aggressive, demanding that Neville _do things_ to him, rather violent things … which terrified him into holding the line. (She remembers quite vividly how understanding he was about her near-miss with the Killing Curse.)

"He can't ever let well enough alone," Neville says.

That would be the understatement of the century, and a just summary of the character of Draco Malfoy …

… and of her own, she must admit.

Then he adds, with an edge of bitterness she cannot mistake, "He fancied that fellow who killed the snake. Longbottom the Slayer of Nagini. Some sort of barbarian hero who goes about smiting and ravishing and all that." He says, "Nothing new. I've never been _anything_ but a stand-in for what someone really wanted."

She glances at him, as they stop; the gateway to the Leaky Cauldron is ahead of them. He's taken a deep breath; he lets it out slowly. When next he speaks, his voice is calm and reasonable, deceptively so, she would think. "I think he's desperate. He wants one last shot at everything…"

She finds herself holding her breath, and then she says, "Before Azkaban. And he's not letting go, is he?"

Neville shakes his head. "Not that I would, in his place." He's silent for a very long time, and then he adds, even more calmly, "I suppose I've made a rather thorough mess of things."

She's silent, thinking how she could say the same.

He says, "Gran will be glad to see you, but she doesn't see visitors much later than this."

He waves his wand. The gateway opens, and they step from the night world of the twentieth century into the welcoming lamplight of the Leaky Cauldron.

* * *

**Author's note:**

The idea and the design of the antique Chinese thaumaturge (which I have embellished somewhat): from A. J. Hall.

The song about Gallipoli: "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" by Eric Bogle. The scene with Neville singing to his parents is (very obliquely) inspired by the final scene of A. J. Hall's _The Perilous Point,_ in which this song features, sung by Neville and the final chorus by Ginny.

The lines of poetry: from "Easter 1916" by W. B. Yeats.

Special thanks to HPLexicon for their map of central London with superimposed wizarding landmarks. I have made extensive use of this site for occasional "fact-checking." Of course, I bear all responsibility for any grievous canon errors and/or exercise of artistic license.


	40. Chapter 40

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**Thursday 26 November 1998**

At that hour, the Leaky Cauldron is crowded, but the space near the great hearth fairly clear; as yet, all the patrons are seated, dining or drinking or both; there's no crush as there will be at closing time, with witches, wizards and others thronging home through the Floo. Hannah comes up and greets them—or rather, greets Hermione; Neville looks embarrassed, and for that matter, so does Hannah; they avoid each other's eyes in a curious way, reminiscent of Ron and Lavender, except without heat… it's more like a shadow crossing the sun.

She thinks, with something of a smirk, that perhaps Draco had been altogether wrong about Neville.

Now that they're here, walking toward the great hearth to Floo to his Gran's house, she isn't sure that she is going to _have it out with Augusta Longbottom_. Easy enough to write that on the list, but what can she say? Nothing really has been offered; Mrs. Longbottom has told her some interesting particulars and she has expressed interest in talking more… later, after Hermione has passed her NEWTs.

She turns and looks at Neville, as he hesitates before the fire, warming himself… yes, they have been walking for a bit…

… in the winter streets of another world. She had looked back at the illuminated towers, the twentieth century in the pride of its power… as they walked toward the gateway to the other world, the one hidden away, not far from all that, indeed within sight of it… _this_ other world. The lamplit tavern glows like a Rembrandt, all deep shadows and golden, illuminated lights.

Firelight suits Neville, she thinks. It brings out the bronze in his hair, the rosiness of his mouth, recasts his ordinary features in ruddy sensuality. Whenever she's seen him by firelight, recently, her eyes have sought out the lines of his body… which now she's seen, even if she'd averted her eyes. But what she avoided at the time she seeks out in memory, and fits to the figure before her…

No. she ought not to be having such thoughts about him, when he's admitted… to doing _that_… with the other one.

The very one with whom she's done far more, and yes, Neville has confirmed what she suspected, that Draco wanted what he couldn't give.

That pale thin boy with the annoying smirk and insolent words, reduced to something not unlike a Muggle, had asked Neville to lay hands on him in punishment and then to tie him down and take him. A nearly direct appeal to violence, not a game at all… no, too tempting, far too tempting, given what that boy did to Neville once, when their positions were reversed. She remembers what Neville said, months back, about Draco's request for firewhiskey: _he wouldn't be involved in an attempt at idiot's suicide._

And she almost played that out, that scene of violence, and he'd looked terrified. He's annoying, desperately so, but not dangerous. Oddly, or maybe not, he still has that sense of impunity… that he can say whatever he likes and they won't harm him. Maybe he assumes that he's safe with her and with Neville, because they rescued him once.

Neville turns to her, and smiles, tentatively. She smiles back, to reassure him. This next part has nothing to do with him, really, and everything to do with her prospects as a citizen—if she's any such thing—these next hundred years.

She has no idea what she's going to say to Augusta Longbottom. It seemed like a good idea before, when she wrote the list (pure bravado, those lists) but now… what does she say?

She feels very, very tired, but that's a sensation she's learned to ignore. She thinks of forced marches across inhospitable country, and how they are accomplished by putting one foot in front of the other, preferably to some rousing ditty and the steady heartbeat of the regimental drums.

… _nor heed the rumble of a distant drum._

"It's getting late," she says, belatedly recognizing that Neville is dragging his feet—why else warm himself in front of the fire at the Leaky Cauldron, when he's a _wizard_, for goodness' sake, and could perfectly well use a warming charm? And she's a Muggle-born witch, who can't remember one moment to the next which world this is.

Neville tosses a few knuts in the bowl next to the chimney-breast, takes a handful of Floo powder, tosses it in the flames and announces Longbottom House, steps through the green flames. A moment later, she steps through after him.

The firelit kitchen at Longbottom House quite resembles her childhood notion of a witch's kitchen, with its rough stone walls and old-fashioned fittings. The elf is small and dark and disquieting, which is to say very unlike the late Dobby; it doesn't say a word but slips past them to summon the mistress of the house.

She's feeling more intimidated by the moment.

Neville stands next to her and she can feel his refusal to move, as if they were standing side by side on the scaffold or in front of a firing squad. (Too many images of execution lately, and all of them Mugglish…) He says in a low voice, almost a whisper, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked you to tell me everything, when I hadn't…"

She says, "Did you tell Derwent?"

He nods. "She reminded me that Healers go through training for a reason. I took on more than I could handle ... because I felt sorry for him. But it isn't wartime any more." He grimaces as if tasting something bitter. "Not officially, anyway."

She scarcely can bear to ask the next question, "So, are you and he still…"

"No," Neville says, and clearly means to say more, but at that moment his Gran enters. She scolds him, without real animus, for leaving a guest to stand in the kitchen, and then looks at Hermione and says without preamble, "You've come from St. Mungo's."

Hermione nods. Those piercing dark eyes on hers are a little unnerving, given that she's come here with the intent to _challenge_ an elder.

"I'm proud of Neville, that he's taken it on. You've no need," and there's a sudden roughness in Gran's voice, which she steadies into harshness, "and you've done it anyway, and I thank you."

Hermione is startled to find that Augusta Longbottom is extending her hand—for a handshake?—with a stony, defiant look that would be terrifying, if she didn't suddenly suspect that it covers something else, some _feeling._ She realizes in a flash that she never really thought of Neville's Gran having emotions of any sort except in theory, or in very distant retrospect (an ill-advised marriage before the Great War, a dalliance in the twenties of the century).

Hermione takes the proffered hand and the handshake is vigorous, even bruising.

There is no question of declining the invitation to have a cup of tea in the front room. Gran summons the tea things, and asks if Hermione might like something more substantial as well. She shakes her head; she's going back to Hogwarts to sleep, and there will be the usual hearty breakfast in the Great Hall.

As they settle into the high stiff chairs in the front room, and the tea pours itself, Hermione half expects that the conversation will turn, as it always has, to politics and the post-war situation. She realizes that Neville's grandmother takes the same sort of comfort as she in tracing the lineaments of the evolving disaster; however near the danger, there's a cold comfort—cold in the sense of bracing—in understanding the pattern that is overtaking them.

To her surprise, Gran's inquiry is rather more personal. "They're feeding you, then, at the Ministry?"

Hermione nods.

"I had a word with young Boudicca. Good lass, but she's a flighty little thing, when she's thinking about something interesting. _Healers_ … though it can't be helped; she's a Derwent after all."

There's a pause, during which they all take a long sip of tea.

"Now this dodgy business with the Goblins… I don't like the sound of it."

Hermione says, "I'm talking to Griphook next week." Gran nods in approval, and Hermione gathers her courage, and says, "No disrespect meant, but I'm curious. Why are you taking an interest?"

"That's an odd way to ask the question. I'd have thought you knew; you're practically family."

It's the entrée to her question, the one that's been burning a hole in her heart all these months. "So, could you explain to me about … marriage prospects?"

Gran looks frankly startled. "I'd think you'd be young yet, to be considering that. I've told our Neville, I was seventeen when I married and that was far too young. Though my parents forced the matter, by disapproving."

Hermione says, "No, I mean _in general._ How it's decided who's marriageable and who's not. Because that's really who's real and who's not, isn't it?"

Gran nods, with a flinty smile. "You've an eye for the essentials, my lass. I like that. It's a matter of who'd you like for family, and it's more complicated, among us. Not just love or money. Magical power…"

It's out of her mouth before she can stop herself. "The purity of the line."

Gran's smile grows almost predatory. "Too many lines have come to an end following _that_ thought. Hybrid vigor, that's the trick; new blood and new ideas." She looks Hermione directly in the eyes. "Loyalty and decency, too; there's too much talk of House and Line, and not enough of whom you're marrying."

Hermione gathers her courage and says, "Neville was telling me about the witches you'd had in mind for him…"

Gran's smile broadens into something rather warmer than Hermione has ever seen on that face. "Then you'll know you've nothing to worry about, my lass. You're quite real to us. Now, you're young and we're at peace now, so all that talk is hypothetical."

She isn't sure she heard that right.

"And of course it's moot now, but I thought it good to have some other choices in reserve: Ginny Weasley, or little Fleur Delacour, or even Luna Lovegood, though she's too near a relation for my taste ..."

_In reserve._ No. She definitely didn't hear that.

" … because it didn't seem likely, after all, with your fancying Ron Weasley, and I'd never consent to Neville having to do with alienating anyone's affections, not that a good lad like him would think of such a thing."

Hermione doesn't need to look to know that Neville is mortified and blushing furiously. She's not sure what to do with her own sense of shock, first at the notion of Neville the home-wrecker, and then at the other thought, that …

"So I was on the list after all."

To her surprise, it's Neville who speaks.

"You were always on the list. At the top. I didn't quite dare to tell you that. In case you weren't interested. It would have been awkward. And I didn't want you to think I was just interested in a marriage alliance."

Some detached piece of her mind finds his tone funny, because it's exactly the way some ordinary bloke would say that he didn't want her thinking he was angling for a quick shag.

"So I'm real?" she says at length. "I'm not just a jumped-up Mudblood?"

"I won't have _language_ in this house," Gran says with a repressive look. "Neville, I'm surprised at you. If you're going to tell the poor lass about your grandmother's machinations, at least give her the whole story." Then she turns to Hermione.

"Now about the Goblins, my lass. So you're going to speak with Griphook."

Hermione nods, and adds "Monday."

"I've been trying to puzzle out this whole business and it looks dodgy from every angle I can see."

Hermione shrugs. This whole _world_ is dodgy, when it's not completely insane.

"They're holding you responsible, when you won the war for them as much as for the Ministry. Maybe more."

"Has the Ministry done anything about their grievances?"

Gran sits back in her chair, with that grim crocodilian smile that tells her she's struck upon the heart of the matter. "What surprises me, my lass, is that you haven't been asking questions rather more publicly."

"I know what the Goblins want, and you said yourself they'd rather take the cash and let the credit go." She sighs, feeling even more weary, and adds, "They don't trust us, and at least from History of Magic it doesn't seem they have any reason. I'm just caught in the middle." She closes her eyes, and lets the velvet darkness behind her eyelids take her into its embrace. "I want to know how bad it is."

Gran says, "It's always good to know the balance."

Hermione decides it won't do any harm to say aloud what's been in the air. "Everyone thinks that they're going to solve the problem by expropriating the Malfoys. Why else would Lucius be the only defendant? It's a game." She narrows her eyes. "But they're going to put me under Fidelius before they give me the master ledgers. What do you think _that_ means?"

Gran's dark eyes narrow as well. "I've had a bet on the Malfoys, these fifty years and more." She looks at Hermione. "How would you place your wager, lass?"

The thousand ice-cold puzzle pieces slot into place in an eyeblink.

"Lucius is all bluff. He's too showy to be _real_ money, and he's been playing about with shadow armies—what else would you call the Death Eaters? War eats gold in this world, just as in the other one." (She congratulates herself for catching herself before she said "the real one.") "And I read that Apollonius Paracelsus was mixed up with Grindelwald, and who knows what he promised… Abraxas seems to have lain low, but Lucius… oh, yes, and Lucius made all those donations to St. Mungo's. Even the little things: there's outfitting the Slytherin House Quidditch team, not to mention hosting the Dark Lord's court for two years and more…"

Her voice trails off as she considers the likely figures attached to those expenditures, and then she says in a clear firm voice, "If I had to place a bet… there's some very bad news in those ledgers, and they already know it." Gran is nodding, and emboldened, she adds, "If real money in this world is like real money in my world, it keeps quiet. Chattox & Device, for example." Gran's disquieting smile broadens. She says, "I had to read between the lines _a lot,_ because they're quiet as mice."

Gran looks at her in silence, with that sibyl's smile, and then at length she says, "I think it would be time for us all to retire. We'll talk on this later."

Neville nods, and says that he will see Hermione home. Gran nods, rises with a magisterial air, and says to Hermione, "It's good to get things sorted, lass. Clear the air. Then we'll put our shoulders to it and dig ourselves out."

And then, swiftly and silently, as if she has merely melted into the darkness, she is gone.

ooo

It isn't until they're standing in the kitchen that Neville says, "I'm sorry. I didn't realize …" and she sees that there are tears in his eyes, that she can hear in his voice when he turns to her and adds, " … that it made a difference to you."

"It made a difference, yes. But I never had the courage to say so, not when I thought…"

He takes a deep breath, then lets it out in the most ragged and impassioned sigh she has ever heard. "I said you were worth twelve of anybody else. I really believe that. You've always stood up for me, and you'd die for your friends, and you're always thinking."

And then he takes her hand and says very quietly, "I'm sorry that I caused you distress."

She nods, the lump in her throat not letting her speak. Finally she says, "I think I've been working too much, and not paying attention." She looks at his face, which is incandescent and hopeful, and adds, "Nothing has been easy."

He puts his hands on her shoulders; it feels comforting, and she nods to let him know that it's all right, and then he leans forward and kisses her on the forehead, a touch of the lips so soft, and warm, and feathery-light that she never would have suspected big, clumsy Neville of such delicacy…

… which is why she doesn't remember his stature, most of the time, except for the rare times when he stands close and she realizes that he's very much taller than she. It's the delicacy that's the predominant impression, even now: his hands on her shoulders, his fingertips reading how thin she is, how close bone comes to the surface, how she's melting away, like the candle burnt at both ends.

He whispers to her, "I'm sorry about that. She's right, you know. I shouldn't have mentioned it at all, or I should have told you the whole thing. I _never_ wanted you to feel as if you weren't good enough. Because it's so far from the truth…"

Something's shifted, because it isn't awkward at all, standing here with him. "I'm not perfect either," she says. "There are things I haven't told you, either…"

He says, "It's Draco, isn't it?"

She says, "How did you know?"

"Because he's _obvious_, if you watch him at all. The way he's looking at you. You do something for him, and he wants more of it."

She knows that she has to be turning bright red; it's as if the hearth fire were suddenly warming her skin from the inside.

He says, "He's stared at you for a long time, and all the more when you ignored him. It's been a running joke with the Gryffindor girls."

She says, "Since when?"

"About fourth year, I think. Certainly since the Yule Ball. The fox and the grapes, or Draco and the Mudblood. Lavender and Parvati used to laugh at him, when he'd scowl at us… said he protested _far_ too much." He smirks, or as close as his face will permit such an expression. "And I still regret I didn't ask you early enough, but it was some satisfaction that it was the famous Viktor Krum who beat me to it."

"You still think about fourth year?"

He smiles at her with a sweet, sad expression. "It was the first time everyone else saw what I saw. Only it took rather a lot of decoration for _them_ to see it, and I could see it every day."

She's rather astonished.

"You mean, you looked at me…"

"… like that. Yes. And most days, it was enough to know that I saw you." He pauses. "I don't know how to say it exactly… but sometimes _being in the presence_ is enough. You don't have to own the sunrise, after all."

She remembers those walks on the moors, setting off early in the morning, that sense of freedom, surrounded by something vast. It's a little startling to be compared to that.

She says, "I'm _really_ not perfect, you know…"

"Oh I never said you were. We've certainly argued enough about ends and means … But you are _something amazing_, and you're … quite fanciable … if you can say that about a force of nature." He smiles. "You scare me, and some of that is being scared _for you_. I don't want anything to happen to you…"

She says, "Don't worry. I can take care of myself." (It's been true so far.)

"I know," he says. He gathers her in his arms and strokes her hair, but this time she can feel the distance he carefully leaves between their bodies; that space is charged and wants to close, just like the negative space between her figure and Ron's, in Dean's portrait. She can feel his effort in holding that space open, and she remembers what his body felt like from the inside, that fire in the bones…

He whispers, "You drive yourself too hard. I can't make you sleep or eat enough. Everyone says you're too thin…"

She startles and pulls away. "'Everyone'? Who's 'everyone'?"

He looks at her quite seriously. "Lavender, for one. Luna. Madam Rosmerta—nearly any time I'm in the Three Broomsticks. Dean. Harry. Harry's worried, because you're still angry at him and he doesn't know how to find a way back. He's not good at that, you know. Gran." He says, "And Percy Weasley. Percy really cares about you."

She's taken aback. "Percy?"

"Oh, Gran gave me the talk when that article appeared in the _Prophet_ about you and Ron. And she specifically mentioned Percy. Said I ought to get weaving, because he was sharp and hard-working and fanciable into the bargain."

She frowns. Any other boy who was interested in her, Ron for example, would have been jealous of Percy after getting that lecture, and here is Neville repeating it.

"Percy's driving himself into an early grave."

Neville nods solemnly, and says, "So are you." He adds, "You and Percy… are like friends from the war. Only your war is still going on."

She would argue, but suddenly she's much too tired, and some of that is the freight of truth in what Neville is saying, and his calm detachment that makes it not matter for argument, but simple observation.

"There's too much to do," she says, "but we have to do it anyway. No one else cares."

He says, "You're wrong about that. Derwent told me that running myself into the ground will do no good for anyone I'm trying to help, and that goes double for you. Harry's not the only one with a saving-people thing. And you think you have to do it alone."

She'd written: _Have it out with Harry._

Maybe the agenda items are going to change a bit:

_Talk to Harry._

ooo

**Monday 30 November 1998**

**Noon, Diagon Alley**

Noonday casts its pearl-and-pewter gleam on the dusting of new-fallen snow in Diagon Alley, as Hermione climbs the white steps of Gringotts.

The Goblins in the front hall nod to her as she announces her appointment. A junior Goblin sidles up to see her to Griphook's lair… more properly, his office, a narrow, dark-paneled enclosure with a high window, glazed in faceted, colorful glass or else jewels. Everything in it gleams darkly as if it were obscurely precious—which no doubt it is.

Griphook considers her across the expanse of his writing desk, and offers her a chair—lower than the height of the desk, she notes—dark bentwood, ancient, Elizabethan in vintage or older yet; she has seen chairs like that in catalogues of Pompeii.

She sits.

"Miss Granger," he acknowledges her, and she meets his eyes, because it doesn't do to be cowed, even before those who once tried to kill you.

"Thank you for granting me an appointment," she says, observing the forms. "I have come to see to my account."

Griphook looks at her in what may be mild surprise.

"Your account?"

"The account of the damages to Gringotts, the war damages," she says. "I would like to know where the balance stands."

"It stands as it ever did."

She frowns. Griphook peers at her, and repeats, "It stands as it ever did, Miss Granger. The Ministry has promised us payment at the end of the trials, when they say that all will be settled."

She says, "They have been paying my salary."

"Not to us, Miss Granger."

"Not to me, either. I haven't a knut…" Involuntarily her mouth opens, and she can feel how dry it is, suddenly.

"They did not tell you the terms of the bargain?"

"No, I was told that my salary was being garnished to cover the debt. All of it." She looks down at her hands, which are twisting, one over the other, in her lap. She stills them.

Griphook's smile, if it is a smile, is ancient and bitter. "Well, that would be nothing new, with wizards. They can't even tell the truth to their own kind."

"I'm not their kind," she says, and then adds, when she sees that smile grow more caustic, "but never mind that. I trust they haven't returned the Sword of Gryffindor?"

"You are not unintelligent," says Griphook, "though anyone who knows the history might have predicted that." He adds, "You were the one who objected to the … _minor deception_ your comrades meant to practice upon us. And now you are the one left to pay the balance. How ironic." The smile is mordant. "Very like the wizards, all of it."

"No," she says, "very like humans, in general."

"That would be true. In the day when we treated with Muggles, there were similar attempts at deception." He adds, "Some of them even successful, but those who were not… paid rather dearly." Unwillingly she remembers, _and some of the bits were still twitching when they buried them._

She says, "I think we've both studied the past long enough. It's time to talk about the future."

ooo


	41. Chapter 41

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Hermione realizes that she couldn't quite believe her ears, and so veers immediately from the future back to the present.

The money has gone precisely nowhere. At any rate, her account _stands as it did_.

She asks again: is the Ministry paying _anything_ on her behalf?

Well, there are contested funds.

And that would include?

Her money, Harry's money, various unclaimed vaults…

She frowns. Unclaimed?

Unclaimed, because the family line has been extinguished in both the male and the female lines. Frequently the contents of such vaults revert to Gringotts, because as a rule families of that sort have substantial caches of Goblin-made artifacts.

Above ground, there are makers and takers. Below ground—in the world of Gringotts—only makers. And the law of the makers is that there is a bond irrevocable and inalienable between maker and made…

She frowns. So there are old Pureblood lines which have come to an end as of the late war?

Griphook smiles, and for the first time she sees recognition—the recognition of the apt pupil. _The only recognition I've ever had here_, she thinks, _and it's always been grudging at best._

She asks if there is any relationship between those assets and the war debts.

Griphook considers. No, it's an ordinary transaction, that reversion. The war debts—the reparations—are something entirely different.

There's a pause, a considering silence, that tells her that something might be about to be proffered. She's learned in the last months—the last nearly-year, she should say—to keep quiet during such silences.

Griphook says, "A rather different bill of particulars was presented to the Ministry. What we want is not reckoned in gold." He smiles mordantly. "We have gold enough, for all they call us grasping. We are the first children of the earth, and she is generous with us." He considers her. "What we do not have from the wizards… is respect. Respect for our laws, for the bond of maker and made, for the common ties of magic."

Hermione says, "You really are the eldest children, aren't you? We're only magical by accident."

Griphook folds his long-fingered hands, that possess several joints more than human hands, and tilts back in his chair to regard her. "Yes, that would be true. We have always preferred to deal with those who understand that—the Muggle-borns." His eyes gleam in the jewel-colored gloom. "What the Ministry does not understand, never has understood. But then the Ministry…"

His voice trails off, and she takes that as permission to expand upon the thought.

"… by and large, is Pureblood. At least the part that makes the decisions." She adds, "You gave them a list of your political requirements, and they turned you down. So the next step was to take it out in gold."

"That would be the essence." He smiles in that strange way, that she has found disquieting this whole time, because it's starting to look like _approval_. "You understand, yes?"

She takes a deep breath before continuing, because after all this is her _life_ that's the collateral. "So I am caught in between Gringotts and the Ministry. Bond-slave until the debt is paid… and from the looks of it, no progress has been made."

"Have you signed any contract with the Ministry?" She shakes her head, unsure of where this is going. "Then you are not bonded to them. As for our claim…"

She says, "Bill Weasley told me that my children might be forfeit."

"That might be so, if the Ministry were to give you over to us under the old dispensation. He was being conservative, giving you fair warning." He says, "_They_ have given you rather a different impression of the proceedings, have they not?" She nods. "As much—or as little—as I would have expected from them."

She says, "So my status is exactly… what?"

"Betwixt and between, neither one nor the other. You do not belong to the Ministry—I won't speculate, but there are _things owed_ on both sides in their contracts, and they don't want to commit that far. You do not belong to us, because we have not settled the matter."

She decides that this is the moment for the gamble, for the question that she's meant to ask all this time.

"I've only read this from the wizarding point of view," she begins, "so necessarily it's prejudiced. The wandmaker's craft is a point of contention, but no one has explained why…" she says, "it's about power, isn't it? Focus and precision and intent…"

"All of those, yes," Griphook says. "And we are _too powerful_ already, in their view, because none of our young fail to have the gift… which is a gift only to them. To us it is a rightful inheritance."

Hermione says, "And as usual, they're more afraid the more wrong they do you." Griphook shrugs, which gives her an odd twinge of fellow-feeling: it's the shrug of long-impacted bitterness. _That's the way of the world, and little good it does us to complain_.

She says, "I would think we would have interests in common. In fact, I suspect that I am a great deal more useful to you at liberty." She adds, as if it were an aside and not the heart of the matter, "What do you think of the Dementors?"

Griphook's eyes narrow. "That is not a casual question."

She shakes her head. "No. The Ministry's weapon of terror. They deployed them generally in the late war."

"Not inside Gringotts, but that was by ancient decree."

"And if the Dementors were … no longer to be on the chessboard, so to speak?"

"The Ministry would have much less bargaining power in general," Griphook says.

"And you would have a better chance of having your demands fulfilled?" She takes his silence as an affirmative. "Is Gringotts a signatory to the original contract?"

Griphook startles and stares at her. "You are treading where you should not."

It's her turn to shrug. "At the peril of my skin and my soul, but that's nothing new. I think that something has changed. They are getting out of the control of the Ministry." She adds, "They didn't exist—not above or below ground—before the Statute of Secrecy, isn't that so?"

Griphook nods.

"So what would be the diplomatic position of the Goblins if affairs were to return to the _status quo ante_?"

Griphook smiles. "I think you are correct, Miss Granger. You are a great deal more valuable to _everyone_ at liberty." That confirms something that she's suspected since she started reading about the Banishing Rite.

"There are things you know about this bargain, aren't there?" Hermione says. "And there are things I'm figuring out. And we have interests in common. So, if we were to accomplish this… would you forgive the debt?" She adds, "Not only mine. Harry's and Ron's." _Go for broke,_ she thinks. _It's only my soul I'm gambling, anyway. _

Griphook looks at her. "_If_… well, _if_ is a little word on paper, but in practice a stumbling block…" He says, "_If_ you… and whoever else is counted in this _we,_ were to banish the Dementors, yes, we would forgive the debt. I would swear the Unbreakable Vow on it."

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Tuesday 1 December 1998, 2 a.m.**

I am still shaking at my lucky guess. That wasn't counterfactual, either, or a figure of speech, Griphook's Unbreakable Vow. No sooner did he say that than he sent for one of the Gringotts junior Goblins, who brought in our Bonder.

It was in fact… Bill Weasley.

I was careful with the wording of the Vow: if I do not succeed, it need only be anyone in my band of brothers and sisters who does—well, I did not name us, but the Vow knows. Anyone whom I might recruit: because thus far it is a small group, though I do not know everyone. There is Viktor, and Andrei, and thus far it is only _probable_ that we'll find what we need, though I will say that today's… no, yesterday's conversation with Griphook raised the probability.

It was a lucky guess, gambler's luck, not a very Hermione Granger sort of thing to do. I thought that the Goblins might know, might have something to do with it. And all of the other threats are _manageable,_ thinkable—the werewolves are, after all, only unfortunates suffering from a treatable chronic condition—but the Dementors are of another order entirely, and all indications are that they have rewritten the rules. On re-reading the reports from Azkaban at midsummer, it may be the case that some of the prisoners did not merely go mad but were Kissed.

Viktor's books have hints about hive-demons, and the sort of bargains that they conclude. A hive does not speak to individuals but to another hive.

The Ministry is such a hive. (Gringotts may be another.) I am not bound to the Ministry, so whatever the terms of that bargain, they do not apply to me. That could cut both ways, but I suspect that the Dementors wrote themselves a perpetuity clause.

The demands of the Goblins are simple: a recognition of Goblin laws of property, the return of key artifacts, including the Sword of Gryffindor, and full civil rights with wizards, including access to wand-lore. Not unreasonable, all around.

And as an artificer of sorts, I have some sympathy with Goblin law, which favors the _maker_ over the _taker,_ as Griphook put it. "The law of the takers is that the thing made recognizes only its taker. The law of the makers knows the bond between maker and made."

The Sword of Gryffindor is beautiful, of course, but who really needs to _own_ it? Only a few times in a century do we need to borrow it, and then the sword obeys of its own accord; the blade was forged with that enchantment woven into the steel itself. In moments of need, those who have both spirit and need can command it—but otherwise, it returns to its Goblin makers.

It is unclear to me why the Hogwarts Headmaster or Headmistress needs an edged weapon cluttering the desk—what are they going to do, open letters with it?

The Goblins' request interferes with nobody—as we saw in the last battle, when the Sword showed up for Neville when he had call for it—and I have no idea why the Pureblood witches and wizards have been so bloody-minded on this point, except that they're that way about everything.

ooo

**Thursday 3 December 1998**

**Midnight**

They say that misery loves company, and so…

So Percy Weasley and I had lunch at the Three Broomsticks, a lunch that stretched out all afternoon. Luckily there was a lull in the work for the War Crimes Commission; indeed, that work is winding down, well in a few weeks, and then I will have a lovely hiatus. Two glorious weeks at the end of December, for the Ministry is lavishly generous to its own, and the whole Yule season, this year at least, is a self-congratulatory series of parties and fetes, public and private both, concluding with a grand ball on New Year's Eve.

I really haven't slept a lot since the middle of November. McGonagall is going to catch me out at some point, but for now I'm pushing as hard as I can. The War Crimes Commission wants all of its questions answered so that the indictments can be prepared before the holidays. They want to make a big symbolic flourish of announcing it all right after the new year, so that everyone's quite clear that we have this glorious new order, and more importantly, that they're on the job. That's hour upon hour of work, and it's as seductive and absorbing as it ever was.

The bankers want their most recent programming changes wrapped in mid-December too, for much the same reason: the bosses want to be able to say that we got something done. I'm a lot less sympathetic with them, because no one is going to die if it doesn't get done, but after all, the higher-ups have their Christmas parties to attend to, and their holiday trips, and we lowlies mustn't interfere with that. I do my time at the Ministry and then I double back with the time-turner, grab four hours of sleep, and wake to work on the programming or go to a meeting.

(And I've seen Nigel twice since he gave me his card. He's not in this set of meetings but he seems to know when they are, and he always walks out of the building with me. But that's an annoyance to be dealt with later.)

I don't sleep more than four hours even with time-turner because thoughts of the deadlines wake me up. Granger hath murdered sleep, not from bad conscience but in the name of deadlines. Dead is dead but dead is not done, and it won't be done, any of it, until I've done it. Then I can sleep.

And I only have two more weeks of this. In two worlds, two and a half worlds, simultaneously. A month of murdering sleep, and then I can rest.

But that's neither here nor there.

Madam Rosmerta understood perfectly well that our lunch was a confidential assignation, not of the amorous but the business variety, and we were given a comfortable booth well out of the way of things, and I do suspect that she added a layer to the _Muffliato_ that I cast.

The table was of most generous size, which spared us the trouble of magically expanding it for the stacks of parchment we both had brought: my population estimates, with the projections forward into the middle of the next century; Percy's figures on the exodus of the Muggle-borns, and the summaries of the Auror reports on both wartime atrocities and the post-war retributions; my own notes on the werewolf problem, including what Ron had told me about the lack of guidelines for Muggle werewolves.

Percy said, with bone-chilling simplicity, that he suspected the Aurors simply killed them.

Oh yes, and there was a rumor, that the Prime Minister—the Muggle Minister—had taken an interest in Malfoy Manor since its Decommissioning. He had that by way of the Secretary of the Task Force herself. Penelope Clearwater, with whom he's had at least a political rapprochement.

"Taken an interest?" I asked.

"Well, it's no longer Unplottable, and the Muggles can see it…"

I didn't need him to say more. "Aerial reconnaissance. Surveillance satellites… oh _dear._" (Hellfire, damnation, bloody fucking apocalypse, Statute of Secrecy over the hill and gone, devil take the hindmost—but I'm not going to use words like that in front of Percy.)

"And mass graves. Someone's told them about the mass graves. But what's really got them flustered is the Muggle-repelling charms. Apparently the Yanks are quite excited, and they're wanting in on it…"

Then he told me that the Pureblood hard-liners, whose name is legion and who are indiscreet in his presence—though they don't exactly embrace him as a brother, given his participation in the Battle of Hogwarts—are _most_ interested in the work I've been doing.

At that point, he said that he would be ordering a round of firewhiskey, because things were going to get ugly.

Madam Rosmerta insisted that it was on my tab.

We drank the first glass in silence, sipping it with almost sacramental solemnity—as befitted the best cask in Madam Rosmerta's stores—and then Percy told me that the picture did not look good, either in the long run or in the immediate future.

My population estimates—pre-war estimates at that—combined with his figures on the Muggle-born repatriation issue added up to the death of wizarding Britain as a viable culture sometime in the coming century: which is to say, easily within our lifetimes, even if we were Muggles.

However, it was the short term that had him really worried. There was rumbling in the Ministry about getting the blood-status paperwork for the general population into a more searchable form. He thought I'd like the sound of that just about as little as he did.

I asked him what else they were planning, because it had to be more than the blood status paperwork from the Thicknesse Ministry. Let me write down what he said, because it cut right through the soft focus of that fiery golden liquor.

"Decommissioning, of course, and a database of Dark artifacts, with the provenance for each, a dossier for everyone involved in the Battle of Hogwarts, some improvements for the Trace on underage magic..."

I groaned, especially at that last. If that had been in force the September before last, I would never have gotten my parents out of the country, because the really wickedly complicated pieces had to be done the summer before sixth year, and that was before I was legal to practice. Some of them got done at the Burrow, and the Muggle bits in London. I did the spectacular parts while I was at Hogwarts, because even with only the basic Trace on me, they would have picked me up had I done them at home or at the Burrow. The last pieces had to be done in a hurry over summer holidays right before the fall of the Ministry, and that was too close for comfort.

"This is not good," I said, "not good at all." Percy nodded glumly and took another swig of firewhiskey.

"Well, the only thing on there that's at all reasonable is Decommissioning," I said.

Quite unexpectedly, he started started talking about Penelope Clearwater, at some length. How he missed her, and how he was never going to find anyone like her. Well, he _had,_ but it was hopeless. How he was going to live out his life lonely and overworked, and that our conversations had been one of the few bright spots in the bleak landscape of _his_ post-war.

I was surprised at this, because he wasn't actually that intoxicated. We'd only had enough to take the edge off.

And then he leaned in and kissed me. All things considered, it was not a bad kiss, and had the virtue of differing quite substantially from my notion of kissing Percy Weasley.

But I know the difference between a kiss that's meant for me and one that is proxy and heartbreak. "You're in love with someone else," I said. "You really ought to save that for her."

He said, "So are you." I stared at him. "And my intentions are honorable. I am rather fond of you, and if you wouldn't mistake it I'd get you a real gift."

"Oh but you did," I replied. "The gift of information."

I spoke truly. He's been bringing me lovely bouquets of facts for simply months, and those are ever so much more appreciated than flowers and sweets.

After a rather uneasy silence, Percy said he had no idea what to do about this business with their wanting to make searchable dossiers for everyone, and it bothered him quite a bit. Because that's where it was going. A searchable dossier for everyone in wizarding Britain. It gave him nightmares, in fact.

Percy stared at our stacks of parchment—documentation of the disaster overtaking this cozy world—with his firewhiskey glass in one hand and his chin in the other. Finally he said that we ought to take all this someplace it might do some good—if nothing else, as a challenge. If nothing came of that, then we'd know where we stood.

"The Minister isn't the Ministry," I said. "You told me yourself."

"No, but he has more power than we do."

He said, "And if he won't give satisfaction, there are Powers other than the Minister." It wasn't power but Power when he said it. "Chattox & Device has some interest in this too—not least because of the embargo. There's the Illustrious Personage."

"And who might he be, when he's at home?"

"Not he. She. Augusta Longbottom. Though properly," he said, "by birth and marriage, she's Emily Augusta Sophia Sophonisba Chattox Nutter Longbottom. Although some of the wizarding records don't recognize the Nutter connection, since he was a Muggle."

Trust Percy to know the facts, and in detail.

"So explain this to me."

Percy drew himself up and put on his Ministry manner as he explained that there were several factors to consider, the income streams in, the investment capital out, and the gold, the latter two of which were largely unknown to outsiders. The income streams consist of the Floo concessions and the potions equipment trade. The latter is subject to the embargo, but the former is not.

"The Floo concessions?"

He began to describe it, and the translation is as follows: a percentage of all Floo powder sold here or abroad, a monopoly on technical support and troubleshooting for the Floo system in Wizarding Britain and all systems in the United Kingdom and abroad based on its design, preferred bidding status for any proposed upgrades…

The words weren't half out of his mouth before I realized what I was looking at, had been looking at, for the last seven years. Anytime that anyone in the wizarding world throws a handful of Floo powder into the flames, some percentage of that flows to Neville's Gran. Neville is not a provincial nobody—or rather, he might be a provincial nobody but he is also the heir to a major fortune. Rather like being the grandson of an oil baron.

That cut through the firewhiskey haze and I muttered, "Oh gods." I'd gotten jaded, listening to Draco rattle on about his father's money all these years, but Neville had never said a word about his Gran except to cite her sage observations, and that rarely.

Not a word. It wasn't words that counted with Neville, but actions. And he'd spoken truly: there were more people on my side than just me.

It wasn't just the firewhiskey warming my heart, though I lifted a second glass (or half-glass, for I'm keeping to limits) in a toast to our conspiracy; it was the confidence of true friendship that led to the next question.

The first favor I'd asked someone, even though it had been Neville who'd told me not to hesitate. The first _real_ favor.

"Percy, you know diplomatic channels. Can you make some discreet inquiries for me in Australia?"

ooo

**Author's note:** Thanks to all of the devoted readers and careful reviewers (both signed and anonymous) of this tale. In particular, thank you for your patience with recent posting delays.


	42. Chapter 42

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Thursday 3 December 1998, past midnight**

Percy looked at me and said that he had heard rumors, yes, that my parents were somehow being held hostage. He had pieced that together from the things that Ron was saying … and yes, he'd like to add that Ron had been out of bounds, talking about how I'd avoided them for years. He had a notion of why that might have been…

"Yes," I told him. "They watched your father and Lucius Malfoy have their little dispute in Flourish and Blotts. And then they listened to your father explain the Muggle Protection Act."

Percy said yes, he could look into it… but what were the particulars he needed to find?

Well, first, if anything were being done there by way of monitoring them, from our side of the border. And then… yes, I wanted to know if there were a Senior Healer in Australia who might be the match of Boudicca Derwent, and if so, had there been any official correspondence between the two.

That might be harder to find out, of course, because even under the embargo there still is personal correspondence. It's not necessarily monitored, especially medical correspondence. The Ministry does have some respect for sacred things.

"And if you can manage it discreetly, you might see whether … separate entrance might be arranged for me," I added. I needed a second opinion, at any rate. Derwent was so enmeshed in _everything_, having so many roles in this business, that I no longer trusted her.

Speaking of Derwent, Percy said, I should know that there was really no one comparable in wizarding Britain, not in her stature as a Healer, and if what he'd been told by Ron about the memory charm was right… well, what I'd done was something rather startling, not usually undertaken _except_ by Senior Healers, and then in teams.

I must confess that my mouth dropped open.

Percy leaned in. "I've read a bit about the sort of thing the Muggles do, you know"—he flinched a bit—"_cutting._ Into the head, the brain… well, they don't do it alone. So in _our world_"—I could feel him holding that phrase with tongs, as if shielding himself from its strangeness—"they _also _don't do that sort of thing alone. You need two spell-casters _at least,_ and you didn't just build a cover story, did you? You built an entire lifetime."

I nodded, anticipating a reprise of the tongue-lashing Derwent had given me. But Percy was more fascinated than horrified. Behind those horn-rimmed spectacles, his hazel eyes were bright with excitement, and a delicate pink tinged his cheeks.

He said, "Never let _anyone_ tell you that you are in any House but the right one. You're a Gryffindor's Gryffindor. A Ravenclaw would have known better, and a Slytherin wouldn't have had the nerve." He added with a wry smile, "And a Hufflepuff would have had more sense—or at least would have found some accomplices."

I laughed aloud, and Percy laughed with me, and then we couldn't stop laughing; we laughed until the tears ran down our faces and Percy had to take off his spectacles and wipe his eyes; he looked at me somewhat near-sightedly, his eyes bright with tears and the corners still crinkled with amusement-and then doubled over laughing once more.

There's more to him than a walking Health and Safety manual, far more; Percy's notion of high adventure is rather arcane, but I seem to have appealed to it most thoroughly.

I raised my glass: "To your sense of humor, Percy—and to your lady love, whoever she is." And then I had to add what I'd said to Neville in rather a different spirit: "And to your beautiful eyes."

ooo

So Percy Weasley is on the job, and he'll even be looking into loopholes in the travel restrictions. There is no rule written that doesn't have a back door—or failing that, a clean and clever way around. He's not a Weasley for nothing. Although I think that Augusta Longbottom is right: Percy's particular brand of Gryffindor shares borders both with Ravenclaw and Slytherin.

Of course, this unofficial diplomacy, like all other of its kind, has a price, and Percy did not hesitate to call it in nearly immediately: Ginny. He has powerful suspicion that there's something wrong with Ginny…

"She's going mad?"

"Perhaps. But not from natural causes. Not the war, or just the war." He says, "Was she as jealous of Harry when all of you were at Hogwarts?"

Ginny had been rather nastily forthright about her contempt for my lack of interest in Quidditch, and she'd disagreed with me about the rightness of Harry having at Draco with _Sectumsempra_. But that was all that came to mind… so I shook my head.

Percy saw that incident at the birthday party, and yes, he'd had a clear view of it and it was Ginny who'd launched the Bludger at me. A good thing it had been an improvised one and not the real thing; if she'd done that with a regulation Bludger she wouldn't have broken my nose but torn my head off.

He'd overheard something rather horrible… had Ginny… at the pub, in October…

I knew what he was talking about because he turned bright red, but I really didn't want to specify it, so I waited for him to do it.

Finally he said, "Snogged you. Not affectionately. Rather to make a point…"

I said, "She was drunk. Very drunk. So was I, for that matter." I looked into my empty firewhiskey glass. "It was a proper scare, really, being that drunk. Worse could have happened than Ginny. So I've rather worked at being more abstemious since."

"So she was saying to Harry that she'd had you too, and then asked was the score even."

"That's really disgusting." I frowned. "There really _is_ something wrong with her, isn't there? She didn't think that way before… twisty, and devious…"

"And violent. I understand you've already heard what she's been repeating in the Auror tea room for anyone to overhear. It won't do. Morally or practically." He bit his lip, and then continued. "If she means to do it, she should keep quiet and do it, and if she doesn't mean to do it, then she shouldn't talk about it. In any case, she's picking up a bad class of friends there. The lot that didn't really take sides during the war, but want to wave the bloody shirt now that it's over."

He frowned. "Addie McConnell, of course, has grievances. A mother, brother and sister. Fenrir Greyback, and we all know that Greyback answered to Lucius Malfoy—at least in the beginning." He said, "McConnell was thick as thieves with Tonks when they were in Auror training, and she took the death rather hard. So call it four family members she lost."

I asked, "So what do you think…?"

"Someone's dosing Ginny with something. I don't like to speculate for what end, but it looks a lot like Amortentia." He counted off the symptoms on his fingers: "Obsessiveness, jealousy, violent tendencies." He added, "That would be a high dose, of course. They're not taking chances, the person or persons doing this."

It made no sense, and I said so. "But Ginny's in love with Harry. And vice versa. Who needs Amortentia?"

"Either to make it absolutely certain—or to break it up." He adds, "As far as I can tell, she started acting odd just before Harry's birthday, and it's been episodes; there are stretches when she's perfectly normal. Or as normal as any of us are these days…"

"Did you say this to Harry?"

"We've talked about Ginny having problems, but no." He paused, staring at our parchments spread out in their curly-edged dunes. "No, I haven't talked to Harry about this theory. I don't want to think about it, but the lines have gotten rather unmistakable lately." He asked, "Would you be willing to help if we need reinforcements?"

I nodded. "I suppose so… but what are you going to do?"

He shook his head, "No idea yet. But it might come to taking her to St. Mungo's by force."

ooo

And then there was the conversation with Harry. Percy had just left with his parchments and the copies of mine and the firm resolution to put it all on the Minister's desk, and soon, very soon. I was looking at my agenda book, which has gotten very complicated: there's the London outing for Draco.

Yes. Tomorrow, in fact… I've rather lost track of time. It's a rare Friday with no meeting at the bank and I'm caught up on the programming projects for once, and so I will indulge myself in an outing that doesn't have to be paid for with the time-turner. Altogether luxurious, and I catch myself daydreaming about a whole afternoon spent in Neville's company, now that we've more or less declared ourselves… well, as close as people like us come.

The other face of that outing, though, is that it's in the line of duty, and our charge is Draco, which never would have been a pleasant prospect and is less so, now, particularly because both Neville and I dealt with our respective conviction of unworthiness of the one we really wanted by having a fling with the one who was there… who turns out to be the same one.

But I won't think about that.

ooo

Then there was the conversation with Harry, which was strained, and fraught, and awkward.

He walked into the Three Broomsticks just as Percy was leaving, and I still had my work spread out on the table. He ignored the heads turning in his direction, and slid into the booth.

"Hello," he said.

I got the last of the parchments bundled into the blue beaded bag, and I looked up and returned the greeting. He looked thin and pale—adult bone structure, boyish skinniness—and he reinforced the impression by running a hand through his hair, which was already disheveled.

I remembered the Pensieve memories: his father swaggering across the lawns at Hogwarts, cock of the walk with his glossy, artfully disarranged mop—odd that Harry inherited that, and some of the gestures, too (which is really spooky) but not all of it…

… not the full-blown aristocratic attitude, because the Potters were _Purebloods _and Harry's a Half-blood, but he does have some sense of entitlement, which showed just now as he sat down without even asking if he might, by the license of long friendship…

…if in fact that's what we had. It feels more to me like an arrangement. I did his homework (and Ron's) and was permitted to tag along.

Harry offered to pay for the drinks, of course, and Rosmerta looked at him and turned him down; I have a lifetime tab and that means nobody buys me a drink in her establishment. She smiled, and I noticed that she has back a bit of her red-gold burnish; I asked her how she'd been and she said, "Better. Much better," and the smile was like the sun coming up.

He said, "You didn't give me a chance to explain, back in October."

"No, I suppose I didn't." I thought, _and you're lucky I didn't kill all of us._ He said, "You just turned your back on us."

I looked at him and I said, "No, Harry, I've been at work. Do you really want to get down to cases about what I'm doing with my time?"

"It isn't a matter of that," he said. "You haven't…"

"I haven't what? I haven't been around to help you out of difficulties in Auror training? They didn't invite me, remember, so you'll just have to take that up with the Ministry." I composed my face with very great difficulty and took a sip of the drink: butterbeer this time, because I did not want to get intoxicated, and I like the warm sweet taste of the stuff. "You're here because you're asking me for something. And you don't need to stay, really, because I already said yes. To Percy. For his sake, and Ginny's."

Harry said, "Do you really think I'm only here to ask you for things?"

"Well, that's been it, hasn't it? Let's see, Hermione Granger, grubby little swot but she's good for digging up the odd fact that turns out to be life-saving." He winced, and I added, "Useful beast she is, machine of exposition whenever you need some back-story about this place that you could have perfectly well dug up yourself, because you had a pass to the Hogwarts library. And let's not forget outfitting the whole expedition last year and bloody _cooking_ for you."

I think that's the one that bothered me the most, and the arguments over leaving money for the food we took, but if I started talking about that I really would lose my temper. All of that is much too near, even now.

Harry said, "I've been busy too."

_I'm sure you have,_ I thought, and took another sip of the drink.

Madam Rosmerta has declared herself in my debt _for life,_ and I didn't really do that much for her: no more than Derwent would have done in the line of duty.

Of course, the tangle of obligations between me and Harry is a bit more complicated. What burns, incessantly, is the sense of having been used; I remember those nights in the tent when I cried, and how it was worse, if possible, after Ron came back, with the two of them banding together to shut me out.

Too close to the bone.

He said, "I think about you a lot lately. About what you'd say about what's going on in the Aurors." He sighed, and stared at his hands.

It's been months, so the familiarity of his gestures has worn off; it struck me odd that I once was friends with this curiously closed-off boy who doesn't quite look anything in the eye. "There's definitely a Pureblood faction… well, more than one. There are the ones who really liked things under Voldemort, and then there are the ones who got hurt and want revenge."

"Addie McConnell," I said. He nodded. "So do you seriously think she means to kill Lucius Malfoy?" Ever so much easier to talk about something technical or political than to discuss what's amiss between us.

And _everyone_ is talking about Addie McConnell, or so it seems, when they're not talking about Ginny Weasley.

"It doesn't matter; they're not letting her on his guard detail. Nobody who talks like her is coming within ten miles of Malfoy Manor. They can't exactly find anyone who didn't lose family to the Death Eaters, but they've got Octavian Diggory and Philippa Bones. They weren't in the Order but they weren't exactly cooperative with the Death Eaters, either. They're more or less just Aurors."

"The Aurors didn't want Dean, you know."

"I know. It makes me feel strange about getting in. You know they did send him an offer, once they found out about his father. So he was right. It was his blood status."

"He told me that he threw the letter in the fire. And he told me that he had a conversation with Andromeda Tonks about her daughter. He'd thought she had trouble in the Aurors because she was a _girl._ The story is that they gave her trouble about being Sirius Black's cousin until she stood up one day in the canteen and recited her whole family tree and then said knowing the Dark up close like that made her a better Auror."

Harry said, "I try to work at it, Hermione, _really_, so I'll feel as if I really earned it and they're not giving it to me because of my name or what I did six months ago. I don't want to cruise on that for the rest of my life." He held out both hands, palm up, and stared at them briefly as if they were unfamiliar, and then raised his eyes to look right at me. "I _have_ been doing my own homework, and I do have an idea what you were doing for me and Ron."

He said, "You know, I thought being an Auror was glamorous. What they didn't tell us is that it's mostly about _getting there too late._ I haven't saved anybody. I write reports on what we find when we get there and the damage is done." He lifted his drink to his lips and swallowed and it was plain to me that he didn't taste it at all. "We had a nasty case last week. Domestic. She killed him, _Sectumsempra _right there in the front parlor and the blood was everywhere…" he stared at his hands again "… and someone thought to do the tests, and she's dosed to the eyeballs with Amortentia." His mouth twisted. "As much as they could piece together was that she'd talked about leaving and he'd dosed her… but he was never very good at Potions, and he overdid it. So she wouldn't let him out of her sight…

"And I saw Ginny in the canteen, and she was talking to McConnell and her lot…" He put the glass down, rather too hard, because the surface of the drink rocked for some moments after. "The look on her face… just like that woman who'd killed her husband." He added, "I looked up the unsolved cases. Parkinson and Goyle and Zabini… that was ugly. Seriously ugly." He sighed. "We saved Goyle and he ended up dead anyway."

_Everybody ends up dead eventually, _I thought, but this wasn't the moment to deliver myself of any philosophical observations_._

Harry said, "You were right. Parkinson was a cow but she didn't deserve to die like that. You were right about Sectumsempra, too." After a pause he said, "I didn't think that it would be … everybody's curse of choice when they wanted to kill someone."

"Not an Unforgivable, though, and a lot more painful than _Avada_."

Harry looked at his hands again. "Snape knew how to undo it, but no one has really duplicated what he did…"

"Some part of it was nonverbal," I said. "They've got the part that stops the bleeding, but the scars…"

"So Malfoy of all people gets away from that looking pretty…"

"He never was all that pretty," I said, "not with that sneer, anyway." I took another sip of butterbeer and let the taste of it wash over my tongue, as Harry frowned and looked uncomfortable.

I looked at him. "You should talk to Percy," I said. "He's having similar doubts about Ginny's condition."

"I thought that she was angry at me, but it would work its way out. Time heals, and all that. Except it doesn't, really. She's still angry at me about breaking up with her in sixth year and treating her as if she were fragile. She got enough of that at home." He said, "So I thought it was just the Weasley temper, so it's taken a long time to notice something was wrong…"

"You should talk to Percy," I repeated. "And I told him that I would help, when he decides what to do."

He asked me if I were free tomorrow, and I told him no, that I had a previous engagement with Neville—at Hogwarts and in London, and I didn't think I'd be back until late.

He put down his drink and said that he'd send me an owl some time in the next week.

I looked at the clock just now, and it's coming on to one a.m. and there's our walk in the morning, so I will forego the opportunity of complaining about Draco… though he was more than sufficiently annoying tonight. Amongst the fish I have to fry, though, he's the merest minnow.

ooo

**Hogwarts, Thursday evening**

When Hermione was a very little girl, she had dolls that she liked to dress up.

There was a brief moment when she thought that outfitting Draco for the next day's excursion to London might be similarly amusing. About five minutes into the task, she remembered that none of her dolls had given her back-chat as she selected their costumes.

He summarily rejected anything from Neville's Muggle wardrobe: too big and, notwithstanding that it could be tweaked magically, simply unacceptable. Mugglish in the worst possible sense of the word. No style. You would think that a pureblood wizard would have a natural sense of style, but in Draco's opinion (expressed at some length) Neville has been subject to corrupting influences.

She remembered that her jeans fit him when she did the Polyjuice experiments, and those were the ones she inherited from Tonks. She pulled the whole pile of Tonks' clothes out of the bureau and threw it on the bed.

"Try these on," she said.

Bad idea. She'd forgotten that it wasn't just boys' clothes in there.

He came out dressed in the high-collared black tunic—which reminded her of the black velvet dress robes he wore to the Yule Ball in fourth year—and the short black skirt. Wrong. Very wrong. Sharp contrast of deep black clothes and too-pale skin, hair, eyes (all ice and moonlight)-and long pale legs.

Very wrong. And disturbingly hot.

"You can't wear that," she said. After a beat. He noticed the delay, and smirked.

She was staring at his legs, and thinking about the cool pale surface of his body continuing upward under the skirt and tunic.

_I really have to stop thinking thoughts like that, because I've sworn off this. Really. _

"And why not, Granger? There are dashing young fellows in paintings all over Hogwarts wearing this very thing, or something not too different." He turned in front of the mirror to admire the back view, which she has to admit is enticing—rather too.

"That was the fourteenth century, Malfoy. You can't walk out into central London dressed like that." _Especially with nothing under it, which is what I'm reading from that smirk of yours._ "And you'll freeze, with bare legs."

He was stroking the furry nap of the tunic and leaning in toward the mirror, no doubt to admire how it set off his pale complexion. "No, you will not get me out of _this,_" he said.

"All right," she said, playing for time. "But you have to lose the skirt."

He leered at her and reached behind to unzip it. Slowly. Wearing his arctic-sultry smile. _Oh, he does know better. He perfectly well knows, and he's playing games again._

She dug the jeans out of the pile and threw them at him. "You're wearing these. Not negotiable." She turned and walked out of the room, to tell Neville that he was going to handle the fight over warm underthings, socks, and sensible shoes.

Neville laughed and told her that Draco wasn't impossible, just difficult, and then sweetened it by taking her hand and saying that he would manage the spoiled child. He dealt with children all day long, and one more wasn't going to ruin his day. She'd done her duty, he said, and she looked tired.

She left his rooms just as Draco was telling him, in that patrician drawl, that Muggle walking shoes were the ugliest thing he had ever seen, and he was _not_ going out in public like that. Full stop.


	43. Chapter 43

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**Friday 4 December 1998**

**Afternoon, London**

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but that was three hours ago.

The usual two Aurors were trailing them, a rare two who could pass for Muggles and didn't mind long-distance walking. Neville, Hermione, and their escort had walked miles that day, shown Draco the river and the Houses of Parliament and the usual landmarks. Neville had drawn the line, however, at queuing up with the tourists at the Tower of London, and Hermione had vetoed the notion of art galleries, because she was quite sure that Draco wouldn't care for static Muggle art.

At first it was great fun, especially watching Draco's reaction to the crowds and the bright lights and shiny glass of the world he'd lived alongside but never seen. The day was pearly grey overcast and chilly, but they were all dressed for it, although she and Neville had fought bitterly with Draco about the matter of clothes. He had agreed to the jeans—as it happened, Tonks' hand-me-downs-and her black tunic, but he refused to wear Muggle shoes, said they were too ugly and insisted on his own boots. Neville warned him that they wouldn't do for walking long distances on pavement, but he wouldn't listen. As well, he had insisted on wearing his cloak rather than a Muggle coat of any description. The effect was rather strange, but Hermione had no more energy for arguing with him, and she figured he would pass for an art or theater student of some description, with his long unbound hair, haughty bearing, and swirling cloak.

The piece that Draco had _not_ understood, because it was past understanding for anyone reared exclusively in the wizarding world, was Muggle geography-specifically, that one got from point A to point B by dint of one's own feet, or the underground, or a taxi, or a bus. One did not Apparate, or Floo, or summon the Knight Bus to get to the alphabetically contiguous point. Although point A and point B might lie cheek by jowl alphabetically, they could be hours apart.

Three hours later, the point had sunk in rather thoroughly, and she and Neville were in the midst of a practicum in parenthood, as they attempted to placate a whiny, exhausted child who didn't understand why he had to keep walking when his feet hurt. And it had begun to sleet, a thin spiteful sort of precipitation that didn't faze her or Neville, since they'd worn waterproof layers, but had chilled Draco to the bone because he was too proud to tell them that he couldn't manage the spell for repelling rain. Hermione cast Impervius, and then discreet drying and warming charms, and resisted the urge to tell him that she'd told him so.

They were somewhere in the financial district by now, and she was trying to remember the location of that little café, the overpriced one that boasted a variety of treats with which she thought they might bribe their charge into amenability for the trip home.

Draco was favoring Neville with a monologue about why it was ever so much more sensible to have one bank, even if it were run by Goblins, rather than the multiplicity of glass and steel monoliths that ran for block after block, when she spotted the discreet gold and silver lettering on the glass front of the café. (She had given up making explanations to Draco about Muggle financial institutions some forty-five minutes back, not least because his naïve questions made her realize just how dodgy the whole business was after all.)

"Here's the place," she said, and dropped back to tell the Aurors that they had arrived, and she would stand everyone a round of hot drinks and refreshments. So their party of five (or one party of three and another of two) trooped in, not standing out too conspicuously in the sleekly gleaming plush interior.

An hour ago, Neville had told her _sotto voce_ that Draco was behaving badly with them because he felt safe, which is to say that he was devolving to what must have been his manner with his mother before his family's disgrace. Somewhat less compassionately, she thought that at least when he was cowering in terror he was _quiet,_ and that may have been the only good thing that Voldemort ever accomplished. She added yet one more tick to her tally of grudges against Narcissa, for raising possibly the most spoiled child she had ever met.

Now, she took a leaf from Narcissa's book and turned Draco loose among the pastries to order what he liked. She ordered a pot of hot tea for the table and some sandwiches for herself and Neville, and covered a similar order for the Aurors. She kept the receipts, too, because this was getting on toward a feast at a serious restaurant and it was just _snacks._ McGonagall would sort it out, she hoped, because this was taking a larger than anticipated bite out of her budget for the week.

Once she was seated, on a plush settee behind a tiny table, with Draco carefully sandwiched between her and Neville, she allowed herself a small sigh of relief. They'd decided against continuing the tour by bus and train; it was far too long back to Grimmauld Place. The difficulty would be in finding a place to deploy the emergency Portkey, given the density of surveillance cameras, but the Aurors had assured them they had the business well in hand; they'd Portkey to the Ministry and then Floo directly back to Hogwarts, to the Headmistress's office, as originally arranged.

However exhausted she felt just now, she was within sight of home, and she could relax and enjoy her overpriced sandwich and hot tea now that they'd figured out the logistics. Neville was eating his sandwich, and reassuring Draco that they would be back at Hogwarts within the hour. Draco was licking chocolate off his fingers and (surprisingly) not flinching at Neville patting his shoulder. She slid a sidelong glance at Neville behind Draco's back, and he smiled warmly at her.

All the while on the walking tour, she'd been stealing glances at Neville, and he at her; now as they sat in the café, with Draco leaning forward to sip his hot tea and nibble delicately at a chocolate éclair, Neville looked at her and his eyes darkened; she felt a mutual gravitation, and the absurd thought crossed her mind that they might steal a brief kiss behind the back of their obstreperous charge, like two young parents with an unruly toddler.

He winked at her and mouthed, "Later."

She tried not to laugh, and settled back to enjoy the sensation of _not walking,_ and the lovely sound of Draco not whining. All was well, or so she was inclined to conclude, until the door of the café opened and in walked a slight figure in a fashionable overcoat—who looked altogether familiar although in the wrong connection entirely—very definitely the wrong connection, as he caught her eye and walked directly over to her table.

"Miss Granger, I presume," said Nigel Black, with a slight and mocking bow. "And may I assume that these are your wizard friends?"

Neville blanched. Draco looked up and narrowed his eyes. Hermione felt rather than saw Draco's immediate hostility, and decided to speak first before Draco said something disastrous. "Yes, these are my school friends," she said. "Neville, Draco, this is Nigel Black. I work with him at my job in the City…" Nigel was looking from one boy to the other, _trying to spot his rival,_ she thought.

Neville put down his cup of tea, stood up as far as the cramped quarters allowed, and extended his hand to Nigel. "Neville Longbottom." Nigel accepted the handshake with an expression that told her that Neville's accent had just disqualified him from serious consideration.

Draco conspicuously rested both hands on the table and stared at Nigel. "Draco Malfoy. Very pleased to meet you, I'm sure," he said, in his iciest tone (_Lord of the Manor greeting the peasants, _she thought). He did not extend his hand.

Nigel responded with a clipped bow, gracefully eliding the refused handshake. It registered on her how very similar their accents were, except that Draco's was a shade more archaically _correct,_ if that were possible.

Though now that she had seen them together, they didn't look that much alike. They both were slight and fine-boned specimens of the same English aristocratic type, but Nigel's hair was sandy light brown, his eyes were pale blue, and his face far less angular.

Nigel gave Draco an equally arctic smile, then looked speculatively at Hermione. "Well, Miss Granger, I see that you prefer _la vie boheme_," he said, with a gesture that indolently took in Draco's eccentric costume. "Please forgive my importunity. I can't possibly compete."

She felt Draco stiffen in affront (_How dare this Muggle…!_) and she was cringing in dread of what he was going to say, and feeling relief that he didn't have the wherewithal to bring off a serious hex and in any case there were two Aurors in the room, when she felt his arm wrap around her shoulders in a distinctly proprietary way, and heard him say tartly, "I believe that Miss Granger—_Hermione_—prefers the company of _her own kind._ As do I." And under the table—though in full view of Nigel, she was well aware—he pressed his leg against hers.

Something flashed in the street outside. Nigel startled, caught by the reflection in the mirror behind them. "Paparazzi," he muttered. Hermione remembered the other reason this place was so overpriced—the occasional opportunity to spot celebrities. Muggle celebrities, that is.

Thankful for the distraction, she hissed in a low voice, "Draco, behave," and stepped on his foot, hard. "Not a word more."

He withdrew his arm with a petulant shrug (_the patented Malfoy full-body pout, _she thought) and managed a tight and civil grimace at Nigel.

She didn't relax again, though, until Nigel had said his goodbyes and gone to the counter to order his own tea.

Neville was the first to choke out, "What was that? How does he know-?"

"The other kind of wizards," she said. "He means computer programmers. He's been after me for a date for simply months and I finally convinced him I didn't date bankers."

Draco said in puzzlement, "He doesn't look like a Goblin."

She turned on him. "What possessed you to impersonate my boyfriend?"

"He was taking altogether too presumptuous a tone," Draco said, "for a Muggle." He took another bite of his chocolate pastry and then licked his fingers, this time in a distinctly suggestive way. He smirked. "I thought you would appreciate me putting him in his place." He wriggled a little closer so that she felt the heat of his leg against hers, and he reached under the table and squeezed her thigh just above the knee. "You have no appreciation for my chivalry. Or for my poor abused feet."

He seemed altogether restored, as if the combination of sugar and a spot of mild Muggle-baiting had been just what he'd needed. And to Hermione's and Neville's inexpressible relief, this relative good cheer persisted for the balance of the trip home.

**Friday 4 December 1998**

**Evening, Hogwarts**

The last of the excursion was a bit of a blur, as they scouted for a location from which to Portkey to the Ministry, which took rather longer than she'd anticipated, all the while hoping that they would get Draco back to Hogwarts before the sugar wore off. To her immense relief, all that came off successfully. They delivered him safe and sound (if a bit footsore) to Hogwarts, and saw him to his room, where he sat down on the bed and declared that he would put his feet up for a bit before supper.

He promptly fell asleep, still wearing his cloak and Tonks' jeans and the black tunic, and without removing the elegant if impractical dragon-hide boots that had been the bone of contention that morning.

ooo

Sprawled across the bed, dead asleep, he looks rather different than awake… translucent, elegant, with a sort of undersea grace, like an antique marble sculpture in an Aegean shipwreck.

Neville remarks on it first. "They all look innocent when they're asleep." He moves Draco's arm, so that it's no longer hanging half off the edge of the bed with the locked elbow as the pivot, but lies relaxed at his side. He lifts each of Draco's feet in turn, to remove the boots, and Hermione smiles at the whimsical striped socks he's wearing: black and acid-green, the sort of thing that one of the witches from Oz might have found a proper fashion statement.

They're more of Tonks' things, Neville tells her, since Neville's socks were too large and these had met with Draco's approval since they were more or less in Slytherin colors. He pulls the blanket over Draco, explaining that he gets cold during the night (_no wonder, he's so thin, poor little thing,_ is implied) and closes the bed-curtains after casting a warming charm. "He won't wake up till morning, I'd wager."

That said, they retire to Neville's rooms, where he produces a bottle of firewhiskey and two tumblers. Hermione raises an eyebrow, and Neville says, "I set it aside this morning. I knew we'd earn it by the end of the day."

She accepts the tumbler; he proposes a toast: "To the indefinite deferral of parenthood," which makes her laugh. She takes a satisfying draught, and smiles at the burning in the sinuses, and then at the ironic thought that she now has something in common with Narcissa Malfoy: the distinction of having stooped as low in the placating of her dubious offspring.

Which is to say (and she says to Neville), she suspects that Narcissa took to stuffing Draco with sweets to stop his mouth.

Neville sits down on the couch and makes room for her; it seems quite natural to sit down, and as natural to lean back into the welcoming circle of Neville's arm around her. She adds, "I am appalled at my lack of maternal scruples. I swear, I would have dosed him with a dummy soaked in gin, if I'd had it to hand." She adds, ruefully massaging her upper arm where Draco's fingers had dug into the flesh, "Or strangled him on the spot. I think the little git bruised me…"

Neville laughs and rubs his thigh. "He got me too. A little higher and I mightn't have had a choice about no children…"

"Cheeky little bastard. So we're his _property,_ are we?"

"He seems to think so. _I think that Miss Granger—Hermione—prefers the company of her own kind. As do I._" That in a passable imitation of Draco-in-a-huff. "The sheer gall…"

"Gall is divided into three parts and two of them are Draco Malfoy." She takes another sip of the drink. "This is good stuff."

"Gran's reserves. I told her what we'd undertaken, and she had no objection." He smiles and she has the foolish impulse to rest her head on his shoulder—which impulse, as she's already feeling warm and righteously tired, she doesn't resist. It's just as comfortable, and comforting, as she'd imagined.

She can well imagine Draco cuddling up to that… who wouldn't, after all?

It's interesting to be this tired; it's like being suspended between sleep and waking. She thinks she's only free-associating, only she hears her voice saying, "I would never have guessed that you fancied boys."

Neville replies, "It's not a matter of fancying boys or girls. It's the particular boy or girl."

Half-asleep, she's not quite sure that she did just say that, or that he answered. At least his answer makes sense… well, sense to her at least, as she's been making up for her monogamous obsession with Ron since age twelve, by letting her eyes wander, from the counterfactual crush on Tonks to the ill-advised fling with Draco to the brief flash of passion with Ginny (even if it were mostly hostile) and the glimmer of attraction to Ginny's older brother.

(She can still feel Percy's lips on hers—a precise, inquiring kiss that might have gone further if she hadn't known with absolute conviction that it was someone else he really wanted.)

And Neville… well, that's complicated, but only if she thinks about it. Right now, it's simple: a warm presence next to her, with his arm around her, friendly and warm and comforting. In its way, that embrace is quite as precise as Percy's kiss: it's is there by way of reassurance, neither pressed close in smothering possession nor poised to jerk away if she says the wrong thing.

He adds, "It's _always_ the particular. I never understood the other view." His voice takes on a dreamy, reminiscent tone that tells her that he's in the same twilight land as she, half-awake and half-asleep: "I remember Ron talking about how he had to have _someone pretty_ to show off at the Yule Ball, and thinking I was ever so much more clever, because I knew exactly whom it was I wanted."

She winces at the memory. "Ron _and_ Harry, both of them. If those people who think Harry is the white knight of the wizarding world could hear him…" She doesn't want to remember, but she hears herself saying the words, "He _shuddered_ when Rita's story in the _Prophet_ came out. The one about him and me… as if there were nothing more embarrassing than to be publicly paired with _the likes of me…_"

Neville doesn't say anything, but the way that he folds her closer to him makes it clear that she needn't explain further.

After a war, after the terrors of captivity and torture and battle, the social hurts of age fifteen ought to have been overshadowed long ago: the humiliation of being the odd-looking girl tagging along with two boys who were besotted with the pretty, the flashy, the sexually prestigious, and whose constant chatter—all the more cruel for its casualness, as if she weren't there—reminded her that she was _none of that_… yes, Harry and Ron at age fourteen had been every bit as much flibbertigibbets as Lavender and Pavarti, just in a different key.

It's only in the borderland between waking and sleep that old things are so vivid…

At length Neville says, in that calm and detached way that might read as casual if she didn't know better, "Harry's always been odd around me. I think I remind him of something unpleasant." He corrects himself, "Not so much lately. I mean … when I was the hopeless duffer and Malfoy's practice target."

She says, "I was in Harry's house once or twice. I mean, the house where he grew up. They kept him in … a closet under the stairs, when he was a little boy. He was bullied at school, too, before he got his Hogwarts letter." What she doesn't add, of course, is that she recognized the condition immediately because she'd been there as well… until one or two instances of wild magic made her schoolmates avoid her, though that hadn't stopped the cutting remarks.

She doesn't remember the moment, but she does remember the surge of resolution, when she decided at age eight that if she ever had the power, she would be the defender of the weak and the crusader for justice, that no one would suffer as she had, if she had anything to say about it.

"School wasn't so bad," Neville says, "I mean before Hogwarts. I even had friends. Robbie and Andrew. They were good lads, even didn't mind that I was rubbish at football."

"Do you still see them?"

"Summers and holidays. Andrew likes rambling, so we take long walks—before the grouse season, of course." He adds, "Of course, the next time we're all home, I'll have to introduce you." He adds conversationally, "Gran wrote me that he's keeping company with my cousin Miranda."

"He's dating a witch?"

"No, Miranda's a Muggle. Well, properly, a Squib." He adds, "You know, they never used the S-word around me when I was a child, so I was quite muddled about it when I came to Hogwarts. Still am, I think."

She can feel her _inquiring mind_ wake up: "So do you know all your Squib kin?"

"I'm not sure. Miranda is _special._ She's … rather more in the line of direct descent. I worked it out in bits and pieces, but I think Gran is her great-grandmother." He adds, "Gran doesn't know that I know, of course. I think she's waiting to see if they get married, and if their children turn out magical."

She said, "I suppose wizarding families have as many secrets as the other kind."

He says, "More, since magic is supposed to be secret. Though really, it's the other sort of secrets that weigh more. Who slept with whom, who's in line for what money, who cheated whom four generations back, who dueled whom in the common room at school, who's at daggers drawn because of something that dates back to their grandparents' time at Hogwarts."

"So it's sex, money, and irrational hatred… just like the Muggles." He laughs and pulls her closer, and she feels his face nestling into her hair.

He murmurs, "You have the most fanciable mind I know."

She turns her face upward and kisses him on the chin. Unexpectedly, he winces. "Hermione, don't, please." She freezes. "You're tired, and there's the firewhiskey. Please … don't do something you're going to want to take back later."

She's wide awake now. "Neville, I'm quite sober, and you're not taking advantage. Nor am I." She draws back and looks at him. "There was someone else, wasn't there." She remembers that awkward moment at the Leaky Cauldron, which suddenly makes sense. "Hannah."

He nods. "After the battle. We'd neither of us had any sleep at all, and then there were all the drinks…" There's a brief grimace of pain. "She had regrets—pretty much straightaway. It's been Justin she's fancied all these years… and I'm not really a proper substitute."

"She told you that?"

"No, I already knew. All you had to do is watch."

"But Justin's gay."

"No, just repressed. The two of them have been dancing about the question for _years._ And of course it's even more complicated now…"

She'd never thought about them together, the apprentice publican of the Leaky Cauldron and the boy who turned down Eton for Hogwarts. How many layers of _complication:_ class and blood status and culture, the Half-blood reared in an old wizarding family and the Muggle-born from hyphenated aristocracy… In the post-war, of course, _it's even more complicated._ She'd always read Hannah's expression as good cheer, but now it's quite plainly a _public face_… She remembers Justin's scars, and the way he holds himself now with ramrod precision, like a military cadet.

How many of her schoolmates does she know only by their surfaces?

He adds, "At least it wasn't about Longbottom the Slayer of Nagini. Unlike certain persons." _The one who's asleep in the room next door,_ he means.

She says, "In my case, I think it was about Bellatrix." He looks at her in frank astonishment, wincing a little at the name. "He knocked me off my broom in flying practice, and I had words with him about it after…" She corrects herself, "I threw him up against the wall and told him he was an idiot, and next time he might not get out of it alive… and that's when he made a pass. And now that I think about it, he's been odd around me ever since that near-miss with _Avada _in the hospital wing."

Neville has started to laugh. "Perhaps he's fancied you ever since you slapped him third year."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Not so ridiculous at all." He adds, in that dreamy considering tone, "He's always been twitchy. Can you imagine how much is _forbidden_ for him?" He laughs. "There was a while I thought he was glaring at the Gryffindor table and squirming because he fancied Harry."

She giggles. "Oh, that's too funny. Draco and Harry. Now there's a couple from hell. The fights. The screaming. The mutual hexing. The sulking." She adds, sensibly, "Of course, not everything is about sex. I always thought he was nasty from pure platonic love of trouble-making."

She adds, "Draco, I mean. Not Harry. Harry's just oblivious."

He says, "You're still angry at Harry, aren't you?"

It's a little unnerving how _observant_ Neville is. Rather like Percy, now that she thinks about it. After all those years complaining about the general obliviousness of males (Harry and Ron being the sample), she now seems to find herself in the company of men who notice things.

"Yes," she says, and now she's quite awake, out of the dream-state where old passions and recent indiscretions can be treated as if they were someone else's life. The resentments with Harry rankle in a deeper way, always and ever entangled with shame and fury. Maybe this is how brothers and sisters feel…

"He's just so _entitled,_ and the war's over. I am tired of being a means to an end. He's always taken anything I did for him as if it were only his due, and he hasn't stood up for me once since the war. He just stood by when Ginny broke my nose back in July… and now he's asking me to help him because he's worried about her."

Neville says, "He arranged your birthday party, and the evenings at the Three Broomsticks. I think he feels bad about it, but he isn't sure what to do. And your talk with him didn't go well, did it?"

"I really meant to be reasonable, but he just made me so _angry…_" Neville is looking at her with his listening face, his eyes on hers. _Be honest now,_ that look says. She says, "He's always been better friends with Ron than he has with me. If it's a choice between me and Ron, I can forget it."

Neville says, "I think Harry might have his own grievances." She frowns. "I watched the lot of you sixth year. Harry was losing sleep over that business with Malfoy, and you and Ron were ignoring him." He looks down momentarily, with a flash of his old diffidence. "Or that's how it looked from the outside." He adds, "And I should say I wasn't entirely disinterested. I kept wondering if I should talk to you… and then you would walk by and look through me as if I didn't exist."

It's her turn to drop her glance, to her lap where her hands have taken hold of each other, fingers rigidly interlaced. "I was pretty beastly sixth year. Self-involved." She remembers the canaries she unleashed on Ron, and the cheat with the Quidditch tryouts. "And ruthless, in petty things."

Neville says, "I used to think it odd that _anyone_ would marry someone they'd known at Hogwarts. We've all seen each other at our worst." He looks at her tenderly. "Harry's still your friend, I think. Maybe he's not very good at it, but he's trying."

She sighs, and realizes how heavy sits the weight in her chest when she thinks about Harry.

"You're angrier at him than you are at Ron. I don't quite understand that. I _heard_ the things that Ron said to you, year on year at table and in the common room, and I never cared for his tone." The stiff and priggish language reminds her a bit of Percy, as does the visible tension in his shoulders. He takes a deep breath before continuing. "He rather took the twins' line about girls. Between the three of them, it made me wonder if Malfoy didn't have a point about the Weasleys."

ooo

And that's how she finds herself in the Hogwarts Owlery, just before curfew, standing at the tall narrow loophole in the castle wall, as chilly twilight descends on the snowbound landscape and the chosen bird soars into the blue gloom, bearing her note to Harry.

_Dear Harry,_

_I'm preempting your promised owl. Might we have another try at a talk? Things went rather badly this last time, and I apologize for my surly mood. _

_I'm at Hogwarts tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps after NEWTs revision?_

_Love,_

_Hermione_

ooo

**Author's notes:** The editing of this chapter was shaped by some very wise observations by my reviewers Becky and NevemTeve, about the emotional undercurrents of the three-way friendship between Harry, Ron, and Hermione in canon.

**Something borrowed: **Neville's cousin Miranda owes her name to her grandmother Miranda, an off-stage character in A. J. Hall's _Dissipation and Despair;_ Robbie and Andrew belong to Silver Sailor Ganymede, from her charming _Explanations _(chapter 6). The romance between Miranda and Andrew also occurs in my AU fic _Four O'clock in the Morning._ The identity of Hannah Abbott's (thus far) unrequited love I owe to NevemTeve, from his moving and all-too-brief AU fic _A Strange Marriage_ (recommended for its alternate version of the fall of Voldemort, its brilliantly plausible take on the well-worn marriage law trope, and a lovely double portrait of Neville and Hermione).

**Credit where credit is due: **

**(Hi mom!):** The witticism "Gall is divided into three parts" I heard many, many times in childhood from my mother. It's a pun on the opening lines of Caesar's _Gallic Wars,_ known if not loved by generations of Latin students.

**(belatedly, and with sisterly love) **The observation (Hermione's mother, in an earlier chapter) that "Kafka was writing documentation" I owe to my brother.

**(to my beloved partner, GJR, the One Without Whom...)** The phrase "full-body pout" originates with my partner GJR, who first applied it to a marvelous solo performance of a teenage character (Phoebe) by the Minneapolis dance troupe Three Dances.


	44. Chapter 44

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**Saturday 5 December 1998**

**Hogwarts**

Hermione thinks that nothing makes Potions revision seem so long as the prospect of talking with Harry afterward. Much as she might be tempted to let her mind wander, she has to pay attention, because it is Potions revision and because Slughorn is running it this time. Although it is not a NEWT-level Potion by any stretch of the imagination, they are learning the steps of the Wolfsbane potion. Snape's improved recipe doesn't require quite the level of skill or the fine control that the original did… so, she thinks, if history of science is any guide, it may well be Snape rather than Belby whose name will be associated with it in centuries to come…

… well, assuming there's a British wizarding world in which such things will be considered. But she won't let that thought intrude, though it's right there in the parchments she and Percy had been reviewing.

Not a thought she likes, not at all.

Next to her, Neville is preparing the ingredients, for the carefully timed ballet that shortly will take place: adding them to the cauldron, stirring, watching the surface quality and the color, stirring again. Like many Potions, this one is best prepared with a partner, and she realizes that Snape's solo preparation of it—under the old recipe, no less—was a tribute to his skill and an artifact of the need for secrecy about Professor Lupin's condition; that silence had been imposed by Dumbledore, of course, and subtly sabotaged by Snape himself, when he assigned the essay on how to identify a werewolf.

Nasty piece of work, Snape—Professor Snape. She's humming to herself, in the meditative state that accompanies the preparation of Potions, hypnotized by all those repetitive steps-the stirring of the cauldron, the chopping, slicing, setting aside of the ingredients, the careful heating of the cauldron-and unbidden comes the question: why was it that Severus Snape so hated Remus Lupin? Well, Sirius Black had once sent Snape in Lupin's direction at full moon… but that wasn't it, no, not by a long shot. There was much more.

That horrible incident of public humiliation… in which Lupin's role had been to stand by, not exercising his authority as prefect to stop the bullying.

Hermione has to agree that there's nothing that exercises her so much as the bystanders to injustice. She'd hated Draco for that, for standing by while she was tortured… though realistically, there was nothing he could have done, even if he'd wanted to intervene; and then, more recently, there was Harry, at the birthday party.

Yes. In all brute justice, Harry had done nothing. He had seen Ginny send that improvised Bludger at her, and had done nothing. And what makes her angry is the number of times Harry shrugged and passed by when it was one of her causes: of course, thoughts of freeing the house elves or even ameliorating their condition were not reasonable, because _things always had been so,_ a poor argument indeed but ridicule doesn't know logic.

Having finished her part, she stands back, out of the way, as Neville finishes the last preparation of the ingredients on his side of the bench. He works slowly and carefully; he's no longer the one she has to rescue. Yes, as he said, he's not such a duffer when no one's shouting at him.

When Snape isn't shouting at him, because Snape is dead. And now she begins to wonder about that animus, too, the one that was never explained: why did he so hate Neville? In Harry's case, it's clear, but less so in Neville's, the harmless little round-faced boy who was marked only by his nervousness, the child of the martyred Aurors…

… just as Harry was the child of the sainted Lily and James, who had died defending him. It was a fact, how they ended, but it wasn't the truth of who they'd been before. There's no trace of it in Pensieve depositions, but Hermione wonders how the Longbottom parents had conducted themselves in the days before the Crouch trials, when the Aurors were empowered to use Unforgivables as necessary.

Had Snape found himself at the wrong end of that rough justice as well?

There might be someone alive to tell the tale, but things get revised out of history as well, when they don't fit the narrative.

Neville turns and nods to her, and she adjusts the flame under the cauldron and they begin the waltz that will conclude, in two hours' time, in the Wolfsbane Potion. Slughorn has announced that he will be testing every batch, and the partners whose efforts pass muster will be noted down for _particular offers _following the NEWTs.

Hermione suspects that the Remus Lupin Foundation has something to do with this new assignment; the Potions revision group is doing its bit for the post-war effort.

ooo

The afternoon is already darkening when they finish Potions revision and climb the staircase out of the dungeons. The four of them walk down the hallway to the apprentices' corridor: herself and Harry, Neville and Draco. The pairs work out that way, because Harry is here to talk to her, and the awkwardness between him and Draco is palpable.

She realizes that it was Neville who settled it, by asking Draco a question about the Potion they had just finished making. Draco doesn't even know that he's been maneuvered, so seamless is Neville's social tact.

Harry looks at the room in which she is living, which she's come to love for its snugness, its feel of a ship's cabin, with the bed set into an alcove, and the shelves likewise, and the desk that is a shelf projecting only a little further out of the wall, and of course the magical candles in their sconces, and the sparkle of faceted glass in the doors of the bookcases that rise seven tiers; for grown-up magical architecture assumes _Accio,_ assumes that you needn't climb if you know the name of the thing you seek. It amazes her that the notion of a magical database didn't occur to them earlier.

She turns to him. "Where would you like to talk?"

"Not inside," he says. "I've been indoors too much." She gathers up her cloak.

"A walk around the lake, then?" She'll need warming charms, too, on an afternoon—a night—like this. The snow that fell as a dusting on London and on Diagon Alley stands feet deep here in the Scottish mountains.

She closes the door behind her. "It's funny, you living on your own," Harry says.

"It's quiet," she says. By which she means, _it's not the Burrow, for better or for worse._ But of course that goes without saying.

The heavy clouds brood overhead, twilight drawing in; they walk into that blue gloom, the unfrozen waters of the black lake reflecting the sullen light. Harry casts the warming charm, and they walk toward the distant lights of the Hogsmeade station. It almost feels like student days, except that they never would have been setting off to Hogsmeade so late in the day on a Saturday, and they would have been walking to the village rather than the railway station.

They don't talk; there's only the squeak of the snow underfoot, which tells her how very cold it is; the warming charm keeps the worst of it off her face—what a marvelous thing, not to have to wrap her face in scarves, but to feel the wind from the mountains, buffered by that layer of warm air—and she feels rather than sees the cadence of Harry's steps next to her. The silence is oddly comfortable, like the companionable quiet when she's walking with Neville… no, that's not quite right. There's a charge, the weight of everything that hasn't been said.

When they reach the railway station, the Hogwarts Express is just pulling in, surrounded by clouds of steam; cloaked and hatted witches and wizards descend the steps. The station is decked out in holiday greenery already, and aglow with lights: whether for Yule or Christmas it matters not, for the effect is the same in either case: coziness, and an appreciation of the comforts of home and hearth.

They stop just short of the station and turn, and it's then she understands Harry's object in walking this way.

Against the brooding sky, in its murky smoke-grey and indigo, the castle looms over the lake, sinister and beautiful and magical, a dark outline with lights glowing in the windows of the Great Hall and the tower rooms, as when she first caught sight of it. They're standing near the place where the flotilla of boats launches each year—or did—to carry the first-years across the lake and into the underground access to the Great Hall for the Sorting ceremony.

For the first time she realizes the meaning of that ritual voyage: they were crossing the black waters from their old life to a new one, as much as if those were named Lethe or Styx. For her, in particular, it was an irrevocable crossing: she had accepted that letter, and her ambitions would be focused in another world entirely; she remembered wondering, on that first crossing, what would be replacing her old dreams.

For Harry…

He's standing next to her in the cold air, looking at the castle wistfully. At length he says, "I like looking at it from here. It's the only place I ever felt at home."

She thinks that the Burrow is the place he _wanted_ to be at home, the home he wished he had, but Hogwarts was the real thing. From here, it looks as it did when they were eleven, no doubt as it's looked for hundreds of years; there's nothing, at this distance, to remind him that Dumbledore no longer holds court at the High Table, that Sirius Black is dead, that Remus Lupin is no longer the Defense professor, that the tower rooms are occupied by war orphans rather than students, indeed that his status as orphan is no longer so very unique, that in any case they're too old to climb those stairs and make themselves at home in the Gryffindor common room.

They were so tiny then; she wishes she had a Pensieve in her room, so she might extract that shining thread of memory and see them all again, from just-turned-eleven to almost-twelve, as they descended the steps of the train and boarded the boats. All of them tiny, from skinny Harry to lanky Ron to round little Neville and all the others, the ones whose faces would become utterly familiar with time.

She heaves a sigh, and realizes that she and Harry have done so at the same moment.

"I had no idea what to expect," he said. "I just knew it was a grand adventure." In the darkness, his hand takes hold of hers.

She says, "It was a war, really. From first year onward, and I had no idea at first…" Harry squeezes her hand.

"You and Ron were the first friends I ever had," he said. "We got through the war together." There's a very long pause. "I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for the two of you. I just wish that the peace would be easier."

Her eyes are still fixed on that castle—the _magical castle_—whose lights dance reflected in the black waves of the lake as the snowy mountains drop into gloom. "We're not what we were. I was doing what I had to do to get us through, because we were friends, and after a while it seemed to me that everyone took it for granted, and then Ron and I broke up…" she takes a deep breath and corrects herself, "I broke up with Ron. Because he gave me the opening, and it was becoming clear that it wasn't going to work out. I never was his idea of a girlfriend, and I definitely wasn't his mother's idea of a daughter-in-law, and it wasn't going to work. Not ever, and it would be best just to amputate it there, and avoid years of pain."

Harry says, "Why are you talking about Ron?"

"Because that was the beginning of _my_ post-war. Because it seemed nobody talked to me after that, and Ron has been more important to you. It doesn't matter if I stuck by you when he lost his temper and went off to sulk; I'm the tag-along." She's surprised in the way her throat tightens when she says that; she thought she was over this, that it was written off and gone. "I was useful to you once and now it's done."

"It seems to me you're a lot angrier with me than you are with Ron."

"I expected better of you. Ron…" She lifts her chin; may as well say it forthrightly. "Ron I've written off."

"I don't think that's fair."

"You're entitled to your opinion." Then she takes a deep breath and says, "It's going bad again. Harry, I don't know how to talk about this without getting angry." She kicks at the snow at her feet. "You talk, then."

Harry clears his throat and looks at the snow in front of them. He still hasn't relinquished her hand. "It seems to me we were always arguing: you and me, or you and Ron, or me and Ron. I thought it was just the war, hard times… that things would be better once that was all over. That life could be _normal._ That we could all have normal lives, whatever that means…"

"Whatever that means on this side of the border."

"You never had a real birthday party here, did you? It was always the first weeks of school. So I thought…" his voice drops "…now that we're older, that we could have fun going out to the pub of an evening, just like _real_ people." There are tears in his voice when he says, "I wanted to be real, like people who have actual parents and brothers and sisters. I wanted everyone to care for each other, like real families do."

He says, "It's been horrible at the Burrow. They're fighting all the time. Ginny is scaring me, and I look at Percy and he's watching her and _he's _scared all the time, and I wonder if I ought to be even more scared than I am." He drops his voice, "Mr. Weasley is at work a lot, and George spends all his time at the shop, and he shuts himself in his room when he gets home. They all come down to supper together, but it's _not the same._"

Hermione listens, because however voluble Harry is just now (for Harry), the tension of his grasp on her hand tells her that there's far more that he isn't telling.

"We used to be able to pull together when someone was in danger," he says. "If I can't ask you as a friend…"

She stares up at the outline of the castle, whose silhouette is rapidly losing contrast with the darkening sky. "Well, it seemed that it all ended once I moved out of the Burrow."

"You didn't talk to us, either."

"Well, there was your birthday party, and after that, I didn't much feel like seeing any of you. Neville fixed my nose, and aside from him, Percy and Luna were the only ones who were of any earthly use." She can feel the tears stinging her eyes at the recollection even now, even though it was a year or more ago. That's when everything changed…

He says, "Ginny and Ron had too much to drink."

"In vino veritas, I would suppose," she says frostily, and then remembers they're supposed to be having a friendly conversation. "I can't talk about this without getting angry. I'm so tired of being _useful_. I've been working without pay for the bloody Ministry for the last…" she catches herself before she says _year_, or _year and a half_, because that's the time she's eked out with the time-turner. She still remembers that sensation in third year, of time stretching out, and for all she did far more with that time than she ever admitted to anyone (McGonagall and Dumbledore included) it was pleasant, mostly—even the legal research on behalf of Buckbeak.

Harry winces at the profanity and drops her hand. "I thought it was the Goblins taking the money."

"Oh no, I went and talked to Griphook. Always worth going to the source. The Ministry won't recruit me as an Auror, but they're willing to make use of an unpaid, temporary slave."

"And you're still there?"

"The job needs to be finished." That's her instinct, of course, and of course there are considerations she's not about to discuss with Harry, namely her clandestine meetings with Percy about the state of the postwar. She's sitting on top of the biggest cache of data in the entire wizarding world, an ideal vantage point: by the time it comes to a serious fight, she will know all their weak points.

He looks at her. "You never told me."

"I only found out last week." She adds, "I'm still trying to find out what's happening with my parents. The official channels aren't much use for that, either. Nothing is happening until _after the trials_, that's the litany, _after the trials_, with the understanding that if I don't play nice I may not get them back at all." Now she's fighting tears, having said aloud what's been at the back of her mind all this time. She says, "But enough about me. You wanted to talk about Ginny."

"That's what … that's why I haven't … been in touch." His voice is so low that she barely can hear it, and they're standing shoulder to shoulder. "At first I thought … the war, and then …"

"She's jealous," she says. "Percy told me what she said, and yes, that's what she did. I'm not going out drinking with her again any time soon. Did you ever give her that card for Derwent?"

A sigh. "I gave it to her, and she threw it back at me, and said she wouldn't go. And then after the lot of you talked to me, I tried again; she made an appointment, but she didn't keep it. Too busy, she said. And it's true, we did get called out on a case…"

"But she made the appointment in on-duty hours, didn't she?"

He nods. "Very convenient, I suppose."

"Convenient, yes, that's a word for it. And now she's talking murder, in public apparently, which sends a very bad message to anyone who might overhear: that we've got vigilantes in the Aurors, and we might have death squads soon… and your fiancée might be involved with them."

He shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other, but doesn't say anything.

"And that reflects badly on you, even though we all know Ginny is very much her own person."

"Do you really think she'd do that?"

"I don't know if it's more likely or less, given that she's talking about it. If I were planning to do something like that, I wouldn't say a word. I'd even let on I was feeling forgiving." She adds, "I'd watch that McConnell. Ginny might be talking, but McConnell _means_ it."

He clears his throat. "So, er, how are you sleeping?"

"Better. It helps that I'm sleeping in my old bed, and not in a tent." She adds, "And the work helps, actually, at least now that I'm finished looking at Pensieve depositions. It's all cataloguing and queries now."

He says, "I didn't think you'd stop being one of us quite so quickly. It's only six months."

"Oh, is it?" She realizes that sounds sarcastic, except that really her perception of time is very much different. A week in her time is only a day or two in the world's time, and that means that she doesn't see her friends very often. It's occurring to her why a time-turner is considered dangerous. She'd thought only of the risk of tangling or breaking the lines of causality, but there are other, more subtle, risks.

She runs a hand through her hair, slowly, and feels the nip of the cold air outside the cocoon of warmth about them. "It's not much," she says. "It feels like more than six months."

He says, "Neville talked to me, too." She turns and glares at him. "No, before you get angry-it's not that I didn't know you were upset. It's just it was usually Ron who'd storm off and leave us two to sort things."

"So what did Neville say to you?"

"That you were feeling as if nobody were there for you, and that we only paid attention to you when you were useful." He says, "Pretty much what you just said. But it's not true. It's just everything there is… worrying, and I don't know…" He straightens visibly. "It's hard to think things out alone. You used to look at things and at least have an _idea_. Even if you were wrong, still it was an idea. And we could argue about it, and eventually something else would come up…"

"So how are you and Ron getting on?" She tries to keep her voice level and neutral, but of course it's as far as possible from a neutral question.

"Fine, at work. He's still sorting things out."

"You don't have to dance around it. I know he's involved with Lavender." There's a silence, and she adds, "It's fine, Harry. We went out together to the Three Broomsticks, Lavender and Neville and I, and it was fine. I'm not pining after Ron, if that's what you mean. I am just wondering if the two of you talk… about Ginny."

"Not really. But he looks worried."

"He should be. Look, Ginny is jealous of me but it doesn't go the other way. There's nothing between you and me, never has been, and she ought to know that."

"We were friends," he says, and she doesn't miss the past tense. "We were closer than she and I were."

She says, "It didn't help that you broke up with her and then left with me."

"With you and Ron. On dangerous business."

"Still, you have to look at it from her point of view." She adds, "Not that it excuses lashing out at Neville and me and anyone else in reach, but that's haunting her, and there's something else going on as well. I think you know."

There's a very long silence. He says, "In the tent…" She has a suspicion of what's coming next, but keeps silent. "In the tent, once or twice, I had … thoughts."

She says, "So what if you did? You didn't _do_ anything, and I certainly never knew. You hid it well with your general surliness." He laughs, a short grim bark.

Harry says, "Well, I'd be a hypocrite to say anything about Ginny and Neville, then." She frowns. "She told him, she said it right to his face and forgot I was there: a substitute, and a poor one."

"She didn't… what did she mean by that?"

"Just what you might think she means. It doesn't matter. They were in combat together; I know perfectly well there are times you just need the person who's _there_…" his voice trails off. "It bothers me more that she'd say that to him. Oh, she'd had a drink or two, of course, but…"

"Poor Neville." She remembers what he told her about Hannah, and his words from before, about never being more than a stand-in for what someone really wanted.

"It's ugly." Harry's kicking at the snow now. After a silence, he adds, "Ron's calmed down, and he doesn't rant about you anymore, so it's not as if we can't be friends."

She bites her tongue rather than say it ("oh, you need Ron's permission?") because she knows perfectly well that it's a petty thought, and in any case the three of them had been at odds, two against one, more times than she can count.

She says, "Percy said that he had been going on about me…"

"Oh, that was months back. Right after you broke up, of course, but he calmed down and work helped. We've been busy. And he's happy about the NEWTs preparation." He grins. "We're actually doing our own work now."

"Took a war to do that," she says, not as disgruntled as she tries to sound. It's taken a war, hasn't it, and a post-war too, and her not being in the picture, for the two of them to grow up…

"I did talk to Percy, and he told me what he thought it was. And then I remembered that murder scene…" He steadies his voice and continues. "He said it could happen to us, too, and we couldn't just pretend everything was fine while we barricaded our doors every night." He says, "I'm sorry it's taken this long. I'm sorry you got frozen out. I didn't mean for that to happen. I tried to keep in touch, but it was hard… with everything."

She isn't going to cry, no, not after all this. It doesn't matter, anyway, because he pulls her into a short, hard hug that's all shoulders and arms, the way he might hug Ron.

"All right," she says at length, "apology accepted, and I'm in. Whenever Percy decides we're doing it, call me."

He nods.

"It's getting late and it's probably cold." She laughs. "Your warming charm is pretty good. I'm not worried about you on NEWTs."

With that, they begin the walk back to the castle along the edge of the lake whose waters are all but lost in the night, with only the faint glitter of the reflected light from the windows to tell that there are shifting depths, out there in the inky dark.

ooo

**Author's note:** The next two months will be heavy work in real life. I will try to keep to a regular posting schedule, but there may be slippage. Thank you for your patience.


	45. Chapter 45

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Mid-December (prior to Thursday 12 December)**

Pride goeth before a fall, my grandmother used to intone. Substitute for that "confidence," "sweet relief," or "the conviction that one has had a narrow escape," and we have my current dilemma. The Howlers have been arriving non-stop.

But first let me remember paradise before the fall.

Harry and Ron and I became fast friends in the wake of my near miss with a troll.

Neville and I have become "we" after surviving a near-disaster with Draco and the Statute of Secrecy, Nigel-the-banker's unfortunate choice of slang, and a chilly London afternoon of Draco's sulks and whining.

Neville giggles every time he contemplates the idea of Draco Malfoy being mistaken for a computer programmer.

I laugh (albeit mordantly) at the idea of Draco claiming me as "his own kind" to spite Nigel, who is more Draco's own kind than I will ever be.

Well, that was the status quo ante, of blessed memory. Not that we haven't had those same laughs since I got the summons from McGonagall the day before yesterday, but they've been distinctly subdued.

ooo

_We_ got the summons, actually. I found myself sitting in the Headmistress's office and there was Neville next to me, and McGonagall was pushing that morning's copy of the _Daily Prophet_ across her desk to me and saying, "Miss Granger, I assume you have not seen this morning's _Prophet._ Would you care to read the front page and then explain this photograph?"

Rita-excuse-me-Skeeter had gotten it wrong again, spectacularly.

There we were on the front page of the _Prophet._ Me, Neville, Draco between us, at the tiny table at _Le Café 'Trop Cher Pour Moi',_ Nigel-the-banker standing and facing us in half-profile in his conspicuously Muggle City togs, but most significant and most appalling, there was Draco smirking with his arm around me and yes, his leg plastered against mine from hip to ankle, clearly visible under the minuscule table. And because the damnable wizarding photographs _move,_ the picture had captured the very suggestive wriggle with which Draco had cuddled up to me, and the way his left arm was wrapping around my shoulders and the corresponding fingers squeezing my upper arm, scant inches from my left breast. Unfortunately, the photographer missed (or discarded) the scene the split-second later when I stepped on his foot and made him retract all of the above.

This lovely vignette seems to have been shot through the café window and cropped accordingly. That must have been the flash we saw, that I foolishly thanked for distracting Nigel.

The article got into scurrilous and speculative detail about my loud noises about clemency for the Malfoys ("Clemency!" I said indignantly. "I didn't say anything about _clemency!_ All I said was that they shouldn't be tortured!") and how, pray tell, these views might have proceeded from my clearly _intimate_ relationship with the Malfoy heir, as indicated in the photograph above-which liaison might also be a ménage-a-trois including Neville Longbottom, hero of the battle of Hogwarts (Order of Merlin, First Class) and grandson of Emily Augusta Longbottom of Roughlee-in-Pendle. Rita didn't scruple to point out the visual evidence: "The careful reader will note the close proximity of young Messrs. Longbottom and Malfoy in the photograph above."

"Gran is going to _kill_ me," Neville mumbled, aghast, when he got to that part.

Rita went on to remind the _Prophet's_ dedicated readers that as the Gryffindor _femme fatale,_ my imposing sexual resume already included Harry Potter, Viktor Krum, Ron Weasley, Percy Weasley, Cormac McLaggen (how'd she find out about him? that was _one evening_ I spent dodging that lout!), and unspecified others, but that in the spirit of inter-house unity, I had apparently diversified my choice of prey from my own House to Slytherin House, including not only Malfoy-the-younger but the late Severus Snape.

"Severus Snape!" I said. "Where'd she get _that?"_

Neville was looking greenish by this point.

I heard a distinct _harrumph_ from Snape's portrait on the wall behind McGonagall.

"Presumably from your support of Professor Snape's posthumous Order of Merlin being upgraded from Third to First Class," McGonagall replied.

Rita takes the view that anything I have done has something to do with services rendered, usually sexual services. I am remembering, with serious regret, just how stupid I was to put Rita under house arrest in a jar. Stupid, stupid, seriously stupid. Not that she wasn't malicious before, but it hadn't been _personal._

She'd had a wizarding photographer trailing us through muggle London. How else did they get that one shot? They would have been following us for most of the afternoon to have arrived on that opportunity; I didn't know up to the last minute that we would be stopping at that café. It hadn't been in the original plan.

As I stared at the photograph, I noticed that Neville and Draco were in fact sitting very close together (the table was tiny after all), and for the most part the view was obscured by Nigel's intervening figure, but there was a brief moment when he moved aside and yes, just as Neville had told me, I saw Draco's right hand on his thigh.

We explained it to McGonagall. I told her about my Muggle job, about which she already knows, and Nigel-the-banker and how he'd been pestering me for a date. All of this made me feel very stupid, until I got to the part about Nigel accosting us in the café, and McGonagall gasped when I quoted Nigel's opening line.

"It's _slang,_" I said. "Muggle slang. Wizard—it means expert, as in computer wizard." Then I added, "Well, it's also a little box that pops up to help you set things in your software." At that point, the gormless expression on McGonagall's face was worth the price of admission. "You know, a software wizard."

She didn't know.

Then I told her about what Draco had done, and the Headmistress came as close as I've ever seen to rolling her eyes.

She didn't. She sighed.

"Miss Granger, you and Mr. Longbottom have been as patient as one can expect with Mr. Malfoy." We nod, chastened. "However, I think that any additional outings should be deferred."

Neville and I nodded in sincere and respectful agreement.

"We shall be taking _vigorous action _with the _Daily Prophet._ I am sure that Boudicca Derwent has already seen this disgraceful article, but I will Floo her directly. This affair has a serious bearing on the work of the War Crimes Commission. Mr. Longbottom, I believe that your grandmother likely will want to be involved in this conversation."

Neville nodded, and gulped.

"And I will be speaking with Mr. Malfoy separately about the peril in which he has placed his parents by this disgraceful exhibition."

Much as we both were annoyed with Draco, we didn't envy him his tete-a-tete with McGonagall.

ooo

So let me inventory the Howlers. The first category, which can be discarded, is the anonymous ill-wishers. The second, of more serious portent, are the red letters from those I know: Molly Weasley, to begin with, whom I bitterly remember as a true believer the _last_ time Rita set out to trash my reputation. Then there's Ron, who has the nerve to ask me if I threw him over for Draco-bloody-Malfoy, and Harry, who's wondering if I have lost my mind. Ginny chimes in with a separate missive, asking how in Merlin's name I could have _anything_ to do with the Malfoys, especially after _all that,_ and she doesn't even mean what she suffered in second year, and what's this about Neville?

I can only imagine the letter that Neville's Gran wrote to him.

Oh yes, and let's not forget the follow-up to all this, which is the extensive correspondence I have had with everyone in my acquaintanceship who favored me either with a Howler or a concerned express Owl.

Then there was my conversation with Boudicca Derwent, in which she cross-examined me about the _exact nature_ of my relationship with Draco Malfoy … in the course of which conversation I had to tell her (under confidential seal of our healer-patient relationship) some _very_ embarrassing things, notably that I had, well, had _slips_ and _errors of judgment, _but that those hadn't actually been the problem on this occasion. It had in fact been Draco's short fuse and notorious snobbishness that got us in trouble.

I will write more of that conversation, when I can stand to think about it.

I wonder at the Malfoys' reputation as clever politicians. Is it merely that Lucius had money enough to cover his own gaffes? Draco's impulsiveness is a copy of his father's, but the Malfoy instinct for blackmail seems to have skipped Draco in this case, because it has been _very_ much in his and his parents' interest that there be no suspicion of improper influence on me. Who was being noisy about getting them (and the other detainees) out of Azkaban and into house arrest? And who was insisting on a proper trial in spite of what she knew (in some cases rather too personally) about their record during the war _and_ before?

The only letter in the whole collection that's reassuring, ironically enough, is from Lavender Brown.

_Dear Hermione,_

_I'm sorry about Ron's Howler. He got it off before I had a chance to talk sense to him. And I'm sorry that people who should know you better are reading all the wrong things into that picture._

_Draco is a prat, and we've all known that since fourth year at least._

_The only thing to be said is that he upstaged me and Ron, though I'm not sending him an invitation to the wedding on the strength of it. I do owe you rather a lot—this on top of a life debt. So if you're not too busy, I'd like to buy you a round at the Three Broomsticks and tell you our news properly._

_Yours in gratitude,_

_Lavender Brown_

Then there's the talk I had with Draco, about how serious this is and how stupid he had been. Not a talk, exactly. I tried to talk, but he interrupted me—rather eloquently.

So I had another error of judgment. Because he apologized on bended knee, I mean literally, as in _both knees._ And at least this was _before_ I talked to Healer Derwent rather than after, so I don't have to Owl her with an addendum to my file.

ooo

I had left him a note that we _needed to talk, _so he came to see me in my rooms. Everything was fine and reasonable, until I turned away to prepare tea for our chat and turned back to find that he'd shucked his school robes and was standing there wearing _that_ ensemble: the one I'd told him was thoroughly inappropriate for central London in the late twentieth century, the one I had worn when I impersonated Tonks.

The costume that turns him into an androgynous creature of really quite unnerving beauty. Not Tonks. Not Draco. Someone else entirely. _Very wrong, and disturbingly hot._ And he knew it, too.

In the end, though, what made the difference wasn't the costume, but the touch. I had made us tea, and I handed him a cup, and took one for myself. He put his cup down very gently, reaching around me to put it down on the desk behind me. Then he closed his fingers around my cup, and took it from me, and set it down next to his own.

He leaned in, closed his arms around me, and kissed me very lightly on the forehead. What struck me was the gentleness, and the desperation, which (I thought at the time) can so very closely resemble sincerity… and the eternal paradox, how this creature of ice and sharp angles is so very hot and silky and soft, skin to skin.

So I did not push him away, because I was fascinated, and as the kisses moved south, from forehead to bridge of nose to mouth, I was intrigued and then interested, and then…

The light was dim. In that first encounter, the mutual spark had been the words (the dare, the insults); now his mouth was, well, otherwise occupied, and by now I was looking down at him and all I saw was the top of his blond head and the hair falling over his shoulders, and then, all in black, his shoulders and back, foreshortened, and the outline of his rear in that too-short black skirt, and I will say that their shapes are definitely not the same, but…

He was on his knees, and I didn't protest too much the terms of the conversation.

What he was doing was very nice. There's no question but that he's an apt pupil. He has practiced _assiduously_, and so my mind was pleasantly drifting, as I leaned back uncomfortably against the edge of the desk and wondered how I was going to manage the cataclysm when my legs would want to give way… and it must have drifted rather further than I thought because at the last I was taken up not by the notion of who this was on his bare knees in front of me but who it might have been…

When I came back to myself after dissolving and crying out, the first thing he said was, "You called me by the wrong name."

I looked at him in puzzlement, and he said, "Who is Tonks?"

I wasn't _about _to answer that question, so I asked him one.

"Why did you think you needed to bribe me with sex?" I had thought myself very clever for bribing him with sweets, and he had just played the same game with me, only with different currency.

"It's the standard reward for rescuing the damsel in distress. I assume it also applies to the handsome prince." He smirked, which told me this wasn't the real answer.

"Neville and I did it on principle," I said. "Just as I gave the Ministry trouble about Azkaban on principle. Just as I made the ruckus about the house elves on principle. And you knew that."

"So virtue is rewarded, Granger. I didn't hear you complaining just now. And I'm not complaining either." He looked down, pinched the bridge of his nose, then looked up at me defiantly. "Even if you like it best when I'm someone else."

"This arrangement … it's a big complication. Politically and otherwise." What I'd meant to say, rather more subtly, when he had _interrupted _me. Where to begin? That I'd had a sexual relationship with a person of interest, a likely war crimes defendant, _someone in the files_? (I'd thought it was a series of slips, but he was treating it as something ongoing. And I had to be honest, I hadn't told him to stop just now.) That he'd decided to make a public display of it and got caught on camera? That he'd involved Neville? (And been _involved_ with Neville, which still burned.) That Rita's insinuations—which for once were true—turned my principled stands on the War Crimes Commission into quid pro quo to the Malfoys?

He gave me the Prince in Exile look. "Thanks a lot. It's _so_ reassuring to be someone's _complication._" He paused to give the next thing time to sink in. "At least that thought won't be food for the Dementors."

The flare of anger made me dizzy. _He _earned_ Azkaban. He cast Cruciatus—multiple times. He stood by while I was tortured. He deserves every moment of torment in that place because I'm going to be stuck with those nightmares for the rest of my life. And he took the one thing I wanted, and crowed about it to my face. _I took a breath and reached for the least dangerous of those thoughts. "And what about Neville?" I said. "Because to be blunt, there are some things about your technique that suggest you did your practice run with a man. And he's my friend…"

"Your _friend._ You're so bloody disinterested, aren't you? You just want to _save him_ from the dirty likes of me. That's why you spent an hour fucking him senseless and saying _'Oh, Neville!'_" I winced at the pitch-perfect mimicry of what I must have said in ecstasy—with the one who wasn't Neville. "Only it wasn't him, it was me. And when the Polyjuice wore off, and it was rotten Malfoy again, I could _see_ how disappointed you were."

He was deadly pale, except for two flushed patches on his cheeks, and his eyes were glittering. His narrow pointed face had the aspect of an animal at bay: something inhuman that would _bite_ you if you got too close, and not in a sexy way, but in earnest, to rip out your throat. _And how did I end up having sex with this creature?_

"And who the hell is Tonks? Because that name is familiar…" The grimace showed his teeth: very white, very sharp. I had a wand, but those teeth were closer.

Another surge of anger, and the words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. "You inbreds don't keep track, do you? Blast somebody off the family tapestry and they're gone. Blast them off the face of the earth and forget their bloody name."

"What did you call me, Granger?"

"Oh come on, Malfoy, why don't you call _me_ what you've been thinking all along? Do you think I don't catch you almost saying it? As if I didn't know your lot wanted me dead. As if I'm ever going to be able to forget it." Lightheaded now, I could feel the situation spinning out of control. It was going to escalate irreparably with whatever he said next.

But he didn't say anything. His face was dead white and he was biting his lips.

_Of course he's going to control himself for the first time in his life. I could hex him to the Shetland Islands and there's not a thing he can do to defend himself. And nobody would say boo at the end of it, because he's a junior Death Eater and I'm a knight of the Order of Merlin._

The next thought formed itself, with an electric shiver that was almost sexual.

_I could do almost anything to him and there's nothing he can do about it, and nobody would believe him if he did complain. _

Abruptly I felt sick, really sick, as if I actually were going to vomit. That thought was everything that I've hated in this place, everything I've fought, at least in words, everything I protested when it was some arrogant pureblood—some _inbred_—saying it about house elves or goblins or mudbloods. It was a predator thought, a Death Eater thought, a Dark Lord thought.

With that thought, I'd joined the enemy.

_I have loved power, and sought it, for a very long time. I have doubted my ability to have it, and therefore set no limits on it. In the beginning I might have pleaded self-defense, but that won't wash now._

Worse, I was using their nonsense for my own ends—and not consistently, either. However angry I ever got at Ron, it never occurred to me to call him an _inbred. _And what set this off? I called Draco by someone else's name, and refused to identify that rival. And I clearly loved him more disguised as Neville than in his own skin.

_I don't owe him an explanation. It's none of his business. And he was playing the resemblance for his own purposes just now. And he won't tell me what he's doing with Neville._

_Yeah, Granger, and you're willing to take advantage of a desperate teenage boy who thinks he's up for life in Azkaban and wants to live a little before he vanishes into the dark. _

That sarcastic voice in my own head had his accent, as if it were speaking for him. Whence, I'm not sure. He never had been my passionate enemy or my shadow the way he had been for Harry; I never respected him, or even noticed him, until he turned up in my nightmares.

I took a deep breath.

His pointed feral face blazed white with rage and humiliation and terror. His throat was working and I could almost feel the dryness of the inner surface sticking to itself.

I closed my eyes to steady myself, take a breath, and said it.

"Malfoy, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

_Be specific,_ said the merciless judge in my head.

"I shouldn't have called you an inbred. I don't even _believe_ blood status means anything, and I was the one who asked for no more insults."

_Say it all; you'd demand it of him_. "And I shouldn't have taunted you."

The hardest of all: "And I'm sorry I called you by the wrong name. That's inexcusable." Those grey eyes watched me steadily.

"Tonks was your cousin. The one who married Remus Lupin. The one that Bellatrix killed." _Full disclosure now. You used him, and he's hurt about it, and he deserves the truth._ "You know, we never did… She wasn't ever my lover in life. I don't think she even knew how I felt. Or if she did, I was just a kid with a crush on her."

He licked his lips, and swallowed. Why did it astonish me so much, that he had human gestures?

"Like you with the portrait-girl." I remembered her name. "With Emily." (I liked that story; it made him human, like a muggle kid with a crush on a pop star.)

"And I'm sorry that I treated you better when you were being Neville."

He looked at me. "You're in love with Neville." It surprised me even more to hear him use those words than to hear him call Neville by his given name; I would have expected _you fancy him,_ or something even more vulgar. "And I would know even without the Polyjuice. I can see the way you look at him. I bet everybody can see it. Probably even Potter has a clue."

My chest hurt and I felt as if I were going to cry. He was going to strike back at me in words because I'd left him an opening, and he knew I wouldn't hex him for it.

"I thought Longbottom was such a duffer, for years and years. Never could understand why you kept saving him from himself. And this year he and the Weaselette and Loony were just suicidally stupid. I honestly didn't think they were going to live out the year. Forget that. I didn't think _I_ was going to live out the year." He shook his head. "And then he kills the damned snake. You cannot _imagine_ how much I hated that snake." (I've had some nightmares about Nagini, straight from Draco's memories. I think I can imagine, at least a little bit.) "And then he saves me from those little monsters, and patches me up, and makes a fuss with McGonagall about keeping me safe. I heard him. He's impressive when he decides to be. And then he keeps visiting me in the hospital wing as if I were his long-lost brother and not some Death Eater slime."

"Not bad, for somebody you bullied every chance you got."

"I know." He looked at me now. "And you're not bad either, considering what I've said to you. And done, when I could get away with it. Or worse, _not done_ when I should have. Even if I still have no clue as to what I could have done without getting killed, because by the time I had the thought it was too fucking late."

That sounded uncannily like an apology. I looked at him and nodded.

"So the duffer and the bushy-haired one are my knights in shining armor. And Potty and the Weasel. Not at _all_ how I thought any of this would turn out." He laughed, and it sounded both bemused and bitter.

"So are you doing something with Neville? Because you are _rather skilled _ in a certain department and it just gives me the suspicion you've had a lot of recent practice."

"I think you know the answer to that. And thank you for the compliment. I do try."

"And what you asked me to do, he refused you."

He nodded. "He didn't think it was a good idea. I think I understand why, now. Not that I didn't thoroughly enjoy it when you did it. You were _scary._ But that's what I was raised to admire. The capably ferocious and ferociously capable. And the wild, and the Dark. Raw power. Which you have in abundance."

_Which I should use responsibly, if that's not a complete contradiction in terms._

He continued, "And you know that I have none, or almost none, so it surprised me that you wanted me at all. I'm scarcely _normal _any more."

I considered my answer. "Where I come from, you're still privileged. You can fly." I looked at him in the clothes he put on to seduce me, Tonks' clothes. "I think we're both intrigued by the exotic. We admitted as much on Halloween night."

"Do I look like her in these clothes?" he asked.

"No," I said. "But you do look disturbingly attractive. As yourself. Scary though that is to contemplate."

He was looking at me with too-bright eyes; I realized he was expecting something from me, some gesture that was going to make it right. All I could remember, just now, was the surname: _Malfoy._ His father, his mother, the unspeakable place that I could not imagine as home to anyone because it is one of the stage sets of my nightmares.

No, he didn't look like Tonks at all, and I spoke truth when I said he looked disturbingly attractive, all long-legged lanky grace in that short black skirt and soft tunic—the latter, the very garment that I wore to the Decommissioning by way of armor—and I remembered how I looked in it: ordinary. Only an ordinary girl, looking a bit out of place in clothes too sophisticated for her.

Whereas, this luminous creature… like Shakespeare's Rosalind, a witty girl played by a boy, all the more gorgeous for that, and not quite real. I reached out a fingertip and touched the sharp tip of his nose, and he smiled a little because it was a silly gesture, and there was an unexpected flash of resemblance to Tonks.

It was the bones, of course, the eye sockets and the bridge of the nose and the pointed chin, even a little in the shape of the face, except hers was heart-shaped and his is triangular.

_Only after you're long dead will they know you were kin to her…_

I stepped forward and took him in my arms and he followed, unresisting, and I remembered from the Pensieve depositions how in the hell of the Dark Lord's occupation of their home, his mother would hold him in the dark and stroke his hair, yes, that would work, that did work, and the fine silky stuff felt pleasant under my hands, and if I closed my eyes and followed the bones with my fingertips, I could think of the lost one he resembled… bridge of the nose, cheekbones, line of the jaw, chin (I kissed it from below).

He made a soft childish noise and I felt a stab of pity, and said, "Here, lie down." On my bed, which suddenly seemed equivocal: _my bed,_ because it was in his that we had done… what we had done.

The bones were the same, and I remembered how the Polyjuice transformation, when he turned into Tonks, had given him barely more discomfort than a middling-bad case of indigestion.

Collarbones, ribcage, the points of the elbows… he was too thin, still. _Stress-induced anorexia,_ a category from the other world. He relaxed, his head tilting back on the pillow; just as in the hospital wing, I could see the line of his throat and the utterly vulnerable underside of the jaw.

The fabric of the tunic was sumptuous; it must have been Andromeda who had bought this for her daughter; no one else who knew Tonks had taste that refined, even a little decadent. I could feel it sliding against his skin, and he murmured a little as my fingers slid over the last of the ribs. "You look better in those things than I ever could," I whispered, lips against his throat.

He moved my hand to the crest of his hip, and as he pressed against me it became clear that I was holding not a girl but a boy in girl's clothing,

"Draco." I thought about what had happened in the café. What he showed off to Nigel, and to our entire world, was something that doesn't even exist. I'm not having an affair with him; this was not an assignation, but a goodbye. "Draco, you are extraordinarily stupid and impulsive. You may have hung us all. All for the sake of ticking off Nigel, who _really_ isn't worth that kind of trouble."

Then he wrapped his arms around me and _snuggled_ against me like a child, and I stroked his hair, and realized that he didn't understand a word I was saying.

ooo


	46. Chapter 46

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Friday 13 November 1998, long past midnight**

I didn't even realize the ill-omened date until I wrote it here, just now. We've crossed midnight into the zone of bad luck. I scarcely can bear to think about what's just happened, which as the nineteenth century writers would have said, defies the efforts of the pen. So I will write about the _last_ thing that I didn't think I could write, which now looks very much more bearable.

The conversation I had with Derwent.

It wasn't so much being asked about one's sexual history, really; certainly my family doctor does that, and I've had that conversation with my parents. Well, my mother, at least in the clinical fashion… because her main worry was that I was _being careful_ and that I wasn't getting hurt. That latter was more difficult for her to ask, and for me to answer, I realize now, because I didn't understand at the time just how much hurt I sustained from my friends, one of whom went on to be my lover.

What a curious word, that. I'm very much more comfortable with Ron—or the idea of Ron—now that I know he's safely in Lavender's custody. And I rather like the new-improved version of Lavender.

Which reminds me of the conversation I had with her.

Yes, I'm putting off the inevitable.

ooo

We went to the Three Broomsticks, where she got us a booth and cast _Muffliato_, because the news didn't justify a private room, she said, and shortly it was to be all over the wizarding world.

She was the calmest of the lot, she said, and she had to say at this late date that she rather sympathized with me for my long association with Harry and Ron. To judge from those two, boys were terminally _thick_.

Ron's failing, she said, was that he was a hothead, and Harry's was that he was swayed by his family, which is to say, Ron's family. She'd seen the look on his face when the whole lot of them stampeded into Arthur's study to compose their Howlers. He'd been uneasy, but Ron's hand on his elbow, and Molly's sharp look, had sufficed to persuade him.

I said that resolved a mystery for me, because Harry and I had recently had had a meeting of the minds, almost a reconciliation, and I was puzzled that he'd been taking the Weasley family line.

Lavender's mouth set itself in a firm line, visibly pulling against the scars that wanted to make a sardonic smirk. "I don't look forward to having Molly Weasley as a mother-in-law," she said. I flinched at first, and then realized that her take was the same as mine: she and Molly were adversaries, and though they'd never be on first names face-to-face, they were intimate in opposition.

"So," she said, "Ron and I are getting married."

That much she'd said in her letter, so I suspected there was more, so I waited.

"Rather sooner than we'd expected," Lavender said. She looked at me, and seemed to judge that her meaning was insufficiently clear, for she added with rather cheerful bluntness, "I'm pregnant. And it's likely to be the only child I can bear, given what Greyback did to me, so we decided to risk it."

It wasn't clear if _risking it_ meant carrying the pregnancy to term or getting married. Either, I gathered, was something of a risky proposition.

She said, "And I'm grateful because you took all the attention." She giggled. "Draco Malfoy puts his arm around you and suddenly you're a scarlet woman. I'm pregnant out of wedlock and Mrs. Weasley scarcely gives me a passing glance." She added, "Of course, pregnant by a Weasley rather sanctifies it in her view, I think."

I couldn't help but laugh. "I suppose Draco's powers of contamination are considerable, given the political situation."

"Of course, he has to overdo it and paw Neville too." She giggled again. "Now that's a _menage-a-trois_ I never would have expected." Her expression got rather more serious. "It never crossed my mind that Neville fancied anyone but you."

Something _shifted_, not unpleasantly, below my solar plexus. I didn't dare to ask but did anyway. "What do you mean?"

She went off in a gale of giggles, like the Lavender of old, so that I was surprised not to hear an echoing volley from Parvati. "Neville's always been doggedly devoted. I think you were the only one surprised when he asked you to the Yule Ball." She added, "It's the Longbottom way, or so my mother says."

She must have noticed the expression on my face, for she got rather more serious and said, "Don't tell me you never noticed." She sighed, and added, "Oh no, I suppose in some ways you and Ron were well-suited. Oblivious, the both of you."

She gestured to indicate that I should drink the butterbeer she'd ordered for me. "No offense meant. There's a price to be paid for everything, beauty and brains alike. I'd be the last one to resent you spending more time wondering about Voldemort's next move rather than who might fancy you."

I noticed that she suppressed rather well the traditional shudder at the name of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, now that it's He-Who-Is-Most-Thoroughly-Dead. Practice makes perfect, after all.

ooo

Only in thinking about it afterward did I realize that I hadn't bridled in indignation at Lavender's ridicule… well, because it had been friendly, not really ridicule at all, and because I recognized the truth in it. The price of single-mindedness is obliviousness to everything in the peripheral vision, and I'd been rather narrowly focused all these years.

And there's no question but that Lavender feels friendly toward me, because she proceeded to regale me with that girl talk that's always made me uncomfortable, whether among my peers or from my mother's friends. The brute fact of her pregnancy—a high risk one—discomfited me, but for her sake I nodded in the right places and assured her I would come to see her in St. Mungo's.

I'm reminded all over again how small a world this is. Yes, some carry grudges for generations, and some make peace as soon as they can. The life debt makes it easier, I think. I wonder too if Lavender has fears of not surviving childbirth, and is _setting her affairs in order_. That thought occurs to me because there's something in her manner that echoes Draco's unwonted seriousness, though without the overtones of desperation. Under the aspect of eternity, schoolgirl rivalries don't look very serious at all.

Draco. Well. That brings us once more to the conversation that I don't want to remember, with Derwent, which in good conscience I should write down.

It doesn't make me look very good. No, none of it makes me look very good.

ooo

Draco had fallen asleep in my arms while I was stroking his hair. I'd been surprised at that, actually, because he'd been quite seductive, and definitely more than a little physically roused, but he must have decided that the simulacrum of mama was more what he wanted. I suppose that's reassuring, that in spite of all the raunchy jokes about Malfoy incest, he doesn't in fact harbor sexual feelings for his mother.

I lay there with that heavy burden in my arms, his head pillowed on my shoulder and his sharp chin digging into my breast, his knees tucked up and the weight of his thighbones making itself felt through the muscles of my own thighs, as he lay cuddled against me in the posture of a very small child…

… which he is not. Thin as he is, and even given that the bed was supporting some of his weight, the burden was not inconsiderable; my arm, under his shoulder and ribcage, was going numb and cramping. Lovely and reassuring though this tableau no doubt looked (well, except for the disquieting note that he was wearing Tonks' black skirt and his legs were bare) it was deucedly uncomfortable. As gently as I could, I turned him on his back, disengaged my arms and pulled the blanket over him. He does look angelic when asleep, which no doubt explains his mother's indulgence; I supposed that this was the picture in her mind when anyone spoke ill of her son.

His mouth fell open and he snored, head tilted back. Then, just as it was occurring to me how very equivocal it looked for him to be asleep in my bed, he made an odd little snuffling gasp and woke up.

He looked at me with a sleepy tenderness that would have half broken my heart if I'd been in love with him. I told him the time, and reminded him that he ought to get dressed… well, at least put on his school robes over those clothes whose intent was altogether too clear.

He smirked and said, "Yes, mother," but stood up and put on his robes. He turned to me at the door and said that he'd return those things, because even if they were his cousin's, they'd plainly been left to me. He kissed me on the cheek, in the way that one's sticky six-year-old boy cousin might, and departed.

ooo

Shortly after that, I was summoned to talk to Derwent. It was short and to the point: she asked if I had been involved with Draco Malfoy in the way that the article had implied, and I answered her truthfully that I'd had slips and errors of judgment. I counted off the encounters on my fingers (to be fair, including the ones in which he Polyjuiced as Tonks and as Neville and as myself) and told her… a sum total of five times.

Then I realized that to some people, given that information, it might seem as if Draco and I had a relationship… especially given that these _incidents_ had been happening since early October, and this was mid-December. In my timeline, they were _isolated incidents_, five times over six to nine months, which scarcely counts. We'd only spent the night together once… which in my mind meant it wasn't all that serious. I realized that I was comparing to Ron, with whom I'd lived under the same roof, and with whom it had been rather more than five times, even though we'd only been together for two months. Ron would have considered once a week serious sexual deprivation.

Of course, I didn't say any of that to Derwent, only gave her the count, but I'm sure some amount of my calculation showed in my face, which I am realizing is my serious weakness. Slughorn meant to flatter me by saying I ought to have been a Slytherin, but even if they hadn't had that bloodline requirement, I wouldn't have passed muster for cunning and indirection, for my face gives me away.

Derwent looked at me sharply and asked, "Was there any question of consent in _any_ of those cases?"

I snapped out of my reverie and said, "No. I didn't force him. He _asked_."

She frowned and then something like a smirk quirked her lips, though she quelled it nearly immediately. "Well. Yes. It would have been foolish of him to attempt to force you."

"As well as _impossible_," I added with some pique. "I've been restraining myself with Draco Malfoy the entire time I've known him." I remembered, in particular, the time that he'd provoked me about Buckbeak. Three or four permanently disabling curses had flashed through my mind as possibilities; when I struck at him, I'd instinctively gone Muggle-style, with an open-handed slap—though on the return, I did backhand him with knuckles—rather than risk what I might channel through my wand, furious as I was.

I said, "And there were a few times that _I_ asked, and _he_ said yes."

She said dryly, "That was not wise."

I nodded; hadn't I just been discussing that, or trying to discuss it, with the problem himself?

"It's also ethically questionable."

"McGonagall told me to keep his secret, and I have. She didn't tell me not to sleep with him." As soon as that was out of my mouth, I realized how colossally stupid it sounded.

"I think the Headmistress did not anticipate the need for such an injunction." What disturbed me, though, were the hints that Derwent was suppressing the urge to laugh. Of course, my eyes were probably sharper because I'd heard my parents' friends talking of such matters, and had known from a fairly young age that keeping a straight face was one of the chief requisites of the medical manner.

I added that I'd had a conversation with Malfoy just now and he seemed to have resigned himself to there being nothing more… though, uneasily, I added that she'd have to confirm that with him, because it was Malfoy, after all.

But then she would ask how it had happened, and I told the story; she raised an eyebrow and jotted something down as I mentioned the Auror who'd shot him down and threatened him—though I hadn't heard what she'd said, I'd only concluded that from the expression on his face (stark terror)—and sheepishly I had to conclude that I'd been drunk, or as good as, when we more or less dared each other to do it…

… and I was clinically explicit about what had happened: mutual masturbation in the first incident, intercourse in the second (with all due protections), and he'd told me it was his first time, and that he hadn't wanted to go to Azkaban without having done that once...

I wasn't sure if that made me angel of mercy or despoiler of virgins, but I felt more than a little creepy telling the tale, for all I was telling it to a doctor, and not least because it made me out impulsive, and stupid, and careless.

On my way back to my room, the only relief I felt was that she hadn't asked, and so I had had felt no requirement to answer, any questions about the equivocal parts: the Polyjuice, and the jaunt off-premises…

… oh gods. Halfway to my room, I realized that I'd misremembered (deliberately?) the actual terms of his house arrest. If he went off premises without permission, it wasn't he would go to Azkaban but his parents.

"I know the penalty if we're caught, so we won't get caught," I had said to him, and he had consented. The boy who had been willing to commit murder to save his parents had consented to a very illegal jaunt with me, for the sake of an hour or two of passion… no, really, I did make it worth his while. It was three or four hours each time, a real lost weekend… that could have landed Lucius and Narcissa in Azkaban. Technically. If we'd been caught, which we hadn't. And strictly speaking, none of it had happened, not in the official timeline: only inside a time loop, like the one that Dumbledore had set up for us in order to rescue Sirius Black and Buckbeak.

That officially hadn't happened, either.

Except that it had, because Sirius and Buckbeak had gotten free, hadn't they?

And Draco and I had spent a grand total of eight hours or so in my parents' house, which does not remotely qualify as Hogwarts or even as the wizarding world.

Of course, if he'd tried to cross the perimeter without my permission, he would have died—not instantly but not pleasantly either. So I suppose I could have argued that he wasn't going anywhere but where I meant him to go, and he hadn't shown any interest in escaping in any case…

… though the Polyjuice might have given him a head start, had he been willing to chance it, which of course was why I had that Potions bench so thoroughly warded. He couldn't have gotten within three rooms of it. No. And an hour's head start wouldn't have gotten him to Wiltshire, given that he was incapable of Apparition.

Even with Apparition, he would have gotten to the Manor and then been taken down by the Aurors guarding his parents. No. Only with the heaviest of backup could he have contemplated anything like escape, and he wouldn't have thought of abandoning his parents to their fate.

I was shaking by then. I hadn't written down any of those possibilities, and it's only writing them down now that makes me shiver. But I sealed that off, anyway, behind that _Fidelius_…

ooo

About an hour later, I got the second summons. One of the Hogwarts house elves fetched me, saying "Miss is to wait outside the Healer's door until called, yes." And then with a confidential wink that might have had a whiff of schadenfreude, "Miss is to wait _in silence_, until the Healer summons her."

I was brought to the anteroom of Pomfrey's office, and a seat indicated to me. The door was open, and I could hear the voices inside: Derwent, and the other…. my stomach went cold. She was questioning Draco.

"It's not a matter of _can't_, Healer," he was saying. "I _won't_. It's none of your affair."

She asked him that question again, that she'd asked me, about consent.

"I'm insulted that you even asked me that."

"You might remember your parents," Derwent said, in a cold level voice.

"The Headmistress already rated me for my _public gesture_, thank you." There was a pause that corresponded, no doubt, to ruffled feathers and the usual puffing-up, and he said, "There was a very presumptuous Muggle making _remarks_ to Miss Granger. I thought it best to make it clear to him that she was not without defenders." He added, with some of his old venom, "And I had no idea some idiot photographer from the _Prophet_ was hanging about the premises."

Derwent said, "I see that we are not going to resolve this question without assistance." That apparently was my cue, as the house-elf materialized to see me into Pomfrey's office.

"Miss Granger," Derwent said, her manner rather cooler than before. "I have been questioning Mr. Malfoy, along the lines with which you already are familiar. We have encountered a difficulty."

Draco glared at me, white-faced… and then I realized that it wasn't so much a glare as that look he put on to mask his fear.

She said, "He appears to be under _Fidelius_."

Draco said, narrowing his eyes, "It's not a matter of _can't_. I _won't_ tell you. It's a private matter."

Derwent turned to me. "Did you cast _Fidelius_ on him?" Something told me that she already knew the answer.

"Yes," I said.

"And you are the Secret-Keeper?" I nodded.

Draco was on his feet, eyes glittering and face dead-white, an expression I recognized by now. "It's not about _her_," he said. "You're going to take everything away, aren't you?" He was carefully avoiding her eyes, I noticed. "The inside of my head, and what I choose to do _in private_, are none of your business."

Then he glared at her, eyes locking on eyes, "You'll have to take it by force. Go on. I dare you."

Derwent said, "I am aware that you are an Occlumens of considerable attainments, Mr. Malfoy. In any case, Healers practice Legilimency only with the _full consent_ of the patient, which you have made amply clear that I do not have."

She pointedly turned her glance aside. "Please do sit down, Mr. Malfoy."

"You're not a Healer," he said. "You're an _interrogator_. I didn't force myself on Miss Granger, and beyond that, it's none of your affair."

Her tone was as level as before. "Miss Granger, will you lift the _Fidelius_?" She added, parenthetically, "As a point of Pureblood culture, it's considered rather bad form to cast it on one's lovers. It implies a lack of trust."

Draco shook his head, but Derwent was within her rights, of course. The problem was that I'd cast it to hide not the fact that we'd had sex, so much as the details… about Neville, and the Polyjuice, and the location, and the time-loop… all of which could land _all three of us_ in serious trouble.

"Miss Granger, please be reassured that I am not interested in the _details_." She looked from me to Draco and said, "Oh, I think I see. There's the honor of a _third party_ involved."

She sighed, and said, "I suppose I should be pleased that today's youth are as chivalrous as in my day, but I've already spoken with Mr. Longbottom." She looked at me and said, "He offered to give testimony under Veritaserum, which I assured him was not necessary."

I remembered that conversation in her office, and shuddered, even as I felt a rush of gratitude. Unknowingly, Neville had saved us all.

I wish I could write about what happened tonight—Thursday night—but I still can't manage it. I keep remembering Draco's defiance in Derwent's office, and I can't stop crying. Poor Draco (not a phrase I thought I'd ever write). His gesture of chivalry—for so he saw it—has unraveled into disaster.

ooo

Thursday night, the second Thursday of December. Hermione realizes after the fact that they had been watching, and knew both her movements and Neville's. They knew that she was never in the castle on a Thursday night and they knew that Neville always left promptly at four o'clock on the second and fourth Thursday of the month, and didn't return until the next morning.

She meets Neville outside the gates of Hogwarts and snow is falling; the wind whips her cloak as she shivers waiting for him. She'd had late meetings in the City and he had worked through dinner finishing a project in the greenhouses, and he is late even for their deferred meeting.

Waiting, not something she usually does, she wonders just where she stands with Neville; the ambiguous business with Draco stands between the two of them, and surely he must know… well, he does know, because she told him, and she's had a confession, or as good as one, from the other party in the business. There's something about the situation that would tempt her to laughter, if she weren't in such uncertainty; it's so like a standard romance plot, where the heroine falls in with the _wrong one_ before she finds fulfillment with the hero. Except in this case, the hero has done the same… with the same _wrong one._

And then there's Nigel Black.

Nigel had followed her to her little cubicle after the meeting this time, which seriously unnerved her, and proffered an invitation to a New Year's party—one of those business-and-pleasure affairs, at an expensive hotel, very definitely not for the lowlies but for the stratospheric social reaches, _the Muggle counterparts of the Malfoys,_ she couldn't help thinking.

She said, "I have another obligation that night." (There will be a Ministry ball, with the usual opportunities for informal politics.) From Nigel's expression it was clear he didn't think much of any _other obligation_, but mercifully he didn't say anything, just looked at her with those pale blue eyes.

Then he looked at the picture, Dean's picture of Blaise and Draco playing chess, on the wall of her workmate's cubicle, and frowned. "That's your little boyfriend." He smirked. "Dressed as a wizard, is he? You did say you only dated wizards." He added, "I think you should reconsider. I'm rather better connected than you might suspect, and all of this…" he gestures to her work space, with the computer and the carefully shelved project binders and the lone picture of her parents "… could be rather _contingent._"

It was an ice-cold moment before it settled on her that he'd made a threat. She narrowed her eyes, thinking about that wand in its sleeve holster, thinking about the _real power_ he had on this side of the border, wealth and connections that outweighed hers by three or four orders of magnitude, and likely he thought he could invoke some _droit du seignieur. _Only by breaking the rules could she redress that imbalance of power.

For all Neville's complaints, she did obey the rules except in extreme emergency. Nigel had her at a serious disadvantage. He likely could get her fired.

On the other hand, she had faced down death threats before, and she wasn't about to give way before a mere _suggestion._

He noticed her expression (likely it could be _noticed_ from orbit), and changed tack immediately. "You needn't look at me like that. It's an invitation. It's a party." A look of hurt flickered across his features. "A rather _nice_ party. Nicer than coffee. I thought you might like it."

ooo

The snow is growing thicker, so when Neville appears it's as a dim outline of blowing cloak, striding down the drifted-over path. He looks dashing, one with the wild elements, dark and romantic… yes, and if you simply recited his CV, it is so: snake-slayer, resistance leader, defender of the weak. The knight pure and without reproach.

He materializes out of the snowy tempest. "I'm sorry I made you wait," he says, and takes her arm; there's something gorgeously authoritative and dashing about that gesture, full of strength and tenderness, as if what he meant was _I'm sorry I've ever made you wait, ever given you any sort of distress.._.

Abruptly he says, "Oh _bother._" Sheepishly adds, "I forgot the book." The book, apparently, that he meant to be studying at his Gran's.

It's pure whim, really, that turns them back to the castle. He has all his overnight things at his Gran's already and surely there are other books there, and the Auror on duty is suspicious even though Neville has prior arrangements to pass the gates after curfew. They walk back to the castle anyway because she knows how it is to wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep, and if you are working on something _useful_ in those hours of wakefulness, you could pretend it was normal.

And he's taken her arm, as if they belong together, and she's just a little bit dizzy, because his intent is rather different than it's been. She's aware of his nearness, for all they're separated by their heavy winter cloaks and some interval of snowy darkness. Something is in the air, some electricity that won't be spoken until after visiting hours. She's grateful that this is _Neville_ who takes the slow plodding deliberate path to everything… and _everything _might well include matters more pleasant than retrieving a forgotten book.

ooo

She knows that something is wrong even as they approach the entrance to the corridor. She'd had a flicker of dread because it was McConnell's night on duty and there's the damnable _Prophet _article and who knows what the Auror will have to say about that.

But McConnell is nowhere to be seen.

Hermione opens the heavy door onto the corridor and hears the scream. Her first thought is that the human voice shouldn't do that.

Abruptly it breaks off, and is followed by ragged breathing.

"No one's coming for you," says a child's voice. A girl's, she would guess, but it's hard to tell. "We're going to have you all night."

Barely above a whisper: "… please don't…" Draco's voice. Of course.

"Oh no," said another voice, a boy's, she thinks. "You don't get to ask for anything. _Crucio!_" The scream breaks in the middle and goes up in pitch. When it stops, it's in a sob. The children laugh. Yes, children, plural, at least ten of them, ranged in a semi-circle with their victim huddled against the wall.

"Well, it wasn't hard to make him cry," the girl's voice says. "How many more before he shits himself?"

She and Neville have their wands out at the same moment. She casts her Patronus and dispatches it to McGonagall. "Apprentices' corridor, at least ten of them, they're casting Crucio on Malfoy, come in with backup."

Neville bolts ahead of her into the corridor and she follows.

The children turn and stare at them, wands out. "You don't get to interrupt this time," says the girl with the pigtails and the sea-green eyes.

Neville says, "No. You don't do that. To anyone."

The girl laughs. "Harry Potter did it to Carrow. And he's got the Order of Merlin."

"It's not going to bring your parents back," Neville says. "It's not going to change anything."

Now it's a clamor.

"He deserves it!"

"It'll be one less Death Eater. They think they can just walk away!"

"He sits there looking at us like we're dirt!"

"We thought you were on our side! And it says in the _Prophet _that you're sleeping with him!"

"You don't care about us!"

"He's ours. It's our right."

Hermione takes the opportunity to cast a discreet shield charm on Draco. He's struggled to a sitting position and is resting his head against the wall. His face is streaked with tears.

Neville looks at them. "All right, let's talk about revenge. Do you know what happened to my parents?"

One of the children volunteers, "Death Eaters got 'em."

Neville says, "What else do you know?" As if this were a history lesson.

The ringleader looks him directly in the eye. "It was Bellatrix Lestrange did it." She jerks her head to indicate Draco. "His aunt."

Hermione is pretty sure they all know the story, but none of them has the courage to say, _tortured into insanity and left as shells._

Neville says, "Right in one. And I was on my way tonight to see them. They've never recognized me, and I've been visiting them like that all my life."

The children look at him.

"All my life. If anybody has a 'right of revenge,' I do. But he's not his aunt. Or his father, or his mother. He didn't do that to them."

The girl doesn't relent. "_They_ did it to _us_. Lots. And they laughed. We're just paying it back." She's annoyed. "You know. You were there. And you're going to let him go free? We don't have _anything_ left."

"Wilhelmina." His voice is very gentle now. "He didn't do that to you."

She answers, "Crabbe and Goyle. But they were _his._ And he was a _prefect. _And everybody knows that the bloody Malfoys get away with bloody everything. It's not fair. You _sit_ with him." There's a pause, while she gathers herself to say the next part, which clearly pains her. She points to Hermione. "And Rita Skeeter in the _Prophet_ says _she's_ sleeping with him. And maybe you too."

Hermione is surprised that they're not trying anything, but all eyes are fixed on Neville. They don't even notice when McGonagall enters, flanked by two Aurors.

"That will be enough," she says in the dry voice that means _you are in more trouble than you can imagine._ "You are coming to my office. Now."

Only now do they lower their wands, and look like schoolchildren rather than junior assassins. McGonagall holds out her hand. "Your wands."

Amazingly, they file by her and hand them to her. No _Expelliarmus,_ just pure force of personality. She nods to the Aurors. "Please accompany them to my office. I will be along momentarily."

The children leave with their escorts.

"Mr. Longbottom, Miss Granger." McGonagall looks older than Hermione has ever seen her. "Would you care to tell me more about this?"

After they tell her what they saw, it seems that what disturbs McGonagall even more than schoolchildren throwing Unforgivables is that the Auror assigned to the corridor wasn't there, the attack was so plainly _planned_, and that the children cited Rita Skeeter's article.

They're dispatched to the hospital wing with Draco and told to wait there until she's finished her conference with the children. Madam Pomfrey shakes her head, examines Draco. No injuries, except for a few bruises where he thrashed against the wall. Neville goes to Madam Pomfrey's office to Floo his Gran that he's going to be later than he expects.

Hermione is shivering, as if that snowstorm outside had frozen her to the bones. She remembers that she's a witch, and could have Summoned those books from the castle, just as she had the little collection in Dumbledore's office, at the start of the quest; likewise Neville is a wizard, and could have done the same…

Neville shakes his head, a finger to his lips to silence her, and she realizes that she's been babbling, saying all this aloud… in front of Draco. He's conscious, still protectively curled up, shivering. Neville is stroking his hair, and murmuring to him that he's safe… which is a lie, a parent's lie, because Draco must know perfectly well that's not so. No, he's saying, "You're safe now," which limits it to the present, and makes it true.

She closes her mouth firmly, knowing that shock makes her loquacious. Draco is whispering something, so softly that she can't hear; she and Neville lean in at the same moment and inadvertently touch foreheads… which sends a shiver through her that's a heady combination of lust and terror. If there weren't a task at hand, she'd have Neville right there.

"You shouldn't touch me," Draco is saying, "I'm disgusting."

Neville makes another reassuring, wordless noise, and Draco says, "I _stink._" He's right, and she knows that smell; it's sharp sweat, the _smell of fear_ that she never understood until she was surrounded by it herself.

Neville has a whispered conversation with Madam Pomfrey, and then very gently undresses Draco, with a tenderness and care that Hermione finds a little unnerving—it's the manner of a mother with a feverish small child—and gives him a sponge bath. _Why not Scourgify,_ her mind asks, and she then she realizes that Neville is _her kind,_ blood and bone, her mirror image from the other side of the border. His first response is Muggle-fashion, ordinary human, and in any case it's likely that the warm water feels more reassuring on Draco's skin than the electricity of magic, given that the latter almost killed him just now.

She thinks about those children, and what just happened, which is that they had help—considerable help, from a source that now seems obvious.

She hears her own voice and feels the strain of her vocal chords as it wants to climb into the upper registers. "I _know_ she did it," she says. "Ten Galleons says that if they check the duty roster, they'll find her damned name on it. Someone was supposed to be there and wasn't, and this thing smells _planned_. I should have told McGonagall before, what she was saying three weeks ago when we went to Hogsmeade. She was on the whole time about his family. Including Ginny Weasley wanting to kill Lucius by slow torture. And how half the Auror Department wants to revive Bellatrix by Necromancy and torture her, too, because of your parents and Tonks. And she all but called Narcissa a whore. I really hate it when _witches_ go on that way about their own. Pure sexism." She stops to catch her breath, feeling dizzy as she remembers the relish in McConnell's voice. "She was saying something nasty to him that day I had the broom accident. Had him on the ground and she'd just kicked him in the ankle. I saw it, and she was muttering something and he looked scared."

In the midst of this, Derwent arrives for the second examination. Hermione moves aside, feeling useless. Derwent nods to her sharply. "The Headmistress will want to know that as well. For now…"

She takes Hermione's place at the bedside and does a complex ballet of wand-work as Neville finishes his task. Madam Pomfrey has brought Draco's things, and Neville looks through the trunk to find fresh clothes: a white silk tunic, under-robe, an outer layer—not the school robes, but the gorgeous black dress robes, that he wore Halloween night. In spite of all the layers, he's shivering still, tears leaking from under his eyelids.

Neville gestures to her, hands her one corner of a heavy winter cloak, and they drape it across his huddled body. It catches on the sharp points of shoulder, hip, knee.

As Derwent and Pomfrey confer, she helps Neville re-pack Draco's school trunk. It's not much different from her own; he doesn't have a lot of things with him: clothes, books, broom, cauldron from Potions class, parchments and quills. There are pictures of his parents; Lucius sneers at her before she turns the photograph face down on the stack of clothes.

They finish, and Hermione sits down for the first time that evening and starts to shake. If they hadn't come back for Neville's book, the children would have been torturing Draco all night. She endured not more than an hour, and she's still having nightmares.

_We've been the bodyguards,_ she realizes, such as he's had them. _That's why Neville insisted we sit with him at Halloween: to send the message that there was someone who would step in. Not that it stopped the attack, but they waited until they thought we were gone._

When they're summoned to McGonagall's office, it's for a conference of very few words: the announcement that she's found a refuge and that Draco will be sent immediately. "With you, Mr. Longbottom," she says. "Your grandmother has agreed to shelter him. As a favor to the Order. You and Miss Granger can help her get him settled and Floo back here in the morning."

One by one they step into the Floo and announce their destination. Hermione stumbles out of the fireplace at the Longbottom house to hear Neville's Gran say in her dry voice, "Well, easier than the last emergency. At least this one's not a toddler."


	47. Chapter 47

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

It isn't until the flurry has passed, the victim settled in bed…

… and Hermione remembers just how tenderly Neville had settled him, holding the cup for him to drink the dose of Dreamless Sleep, and kissing him on the forehead just as he relaxed into heavy-limbed sleep.

It isn't until the flurry has died down, and they are sitting at the bedside, waiting for Andromeda Tonks to arrive, in her capacity of guardian, that Neville takes her hand and whispers, "I failed."

She says, "No. You prevented this." What she means: _they didn't torture him all night. He didn't end up like your parents._

He says, "No. I failed with them, if they are still thinking that this is the answer. Wilhelmina especially. If it weren't for her, and one or two of the others, the rest never would have gone along." He makes a face, as if tasting something bitter. "That's most people, of course. They _go along_. It's the ones that incite them that we have to watch."

He's grasping her hand rather tightly, and his hand is both strong and very much larger than hers; the pressure is just short of painful, and she flinches in warning. He glances down, with an apologetic look, and relaxes his grip.

"You have to remember what Derwent told you," she says. "You prevented something evil."

Neville shakes his head. "I know. Professor Lupin told me the same thing. But he's dead." He shudders, and she reaches across to touch his shoulder, and feels the tension in it.

She stands, and puts her hands on his shoulders, with firm reassurance. There's a pause, a hitch, and then, apparently, he remembers to breathe again. He says, "He came to see me in the hospital wing, after the raid sixth year. He told me he knew what I'd done, taking down Greyback." He hangs his head. "Now if I'd _killed_ Greyback, that would have been something. I would have prevented what happened to Lavender and Justin, at a minimum…"

She says, "So what did Professor Lupin tell you?"

"He said…" there's a pause, and then she can almost hear the careful quotes in what follows. "He said that there were students sleeping in their beds, who didn't even know to be grateful, because of what _hadn't_ happened to them that night. That the saying about an ounce of prevention wasn't an idle proverb, and he reckoned the exchange rate rather higher." She doesn't notice at first that she's begun to knead the muscles in his shoulders, until he sighs and relaxes backward to rest his head against her. "He would think that, I suppose, given his condition could have been _prevented_."

By wandlight, very little color shows in any of their surroundings; Draco lies in the bed, dark covers pulled up to his chest, and one arm above the covers, the hand still clenched even in sleep.

The door opens with a creak; Hermione turns and startles at first—just a flash of that face from her nightmare, and then it's very plainly _Andromeda, not Bellatrix_. The expression could not belong to Bellatrix: it's a quiet, grown-up attentiveness, not affectionate exactly, but _careful_.

Hermione puts her hands on Neville's shoulders again, and this time, it's enough to make him relax. Andromeda sits down in the chair she has vacated, leans over her nephew, lifts his clenched hand, uncurls the fingers, and gently lays the hand down. In the colorless light, his sharp features have some of the pinched and shrunken look of a corpse. Hermione wishes she didn't know what that meant.

(She sees Thestrals, sometimes, on toward dusk as she's looking toward the Forbidden Forest.)

Neville shudders. Andromeda looks at him with that quiet attention, her eyes dark in the dim light. Hermione realizes that she does not remember what color they are in daylight. Her sister's are pale blue… yes, that's another face she'll remember forever, the guardian of the gates of hell, the one who identified her, _the Mudblood_, from the newspaper photograph. The _other sister_, well, her eyes were dark because they looked onto void, the place to which the Dementors take you…

… which reminds her that it's only Friday and the weekend, and then she'll be accompanying Derwent on her tour of inspection at Azkaban Fortress. It's not only the financial records that are bound by the Fidelius; _certain things_ she sees there may be as well.

Curious wording. No, she doesn't want to think about the tower in the North Sea, given how very nearly she herself missed being immured there… assuming that they hadn't killed her outright. Xeno Lovegood had been imprisoned there, twice.

She looks at the pale pointed face on the pillow… angelic because relaxed, because not sneering or smirking or glowering, but only asleep. In clean clothes—layers of them, the layers of silk and cotton and wool between him and the chill of that ancient castle, and this rather more recent stone house, flinty as its mistress. In Azkaban, it will be coarse grey robes and eternal cold… the cold in the soul being the worse of the two, she would think.

Though she does wonder about the life expectancy of prisoners sentenced to the grim tower… another question not explored, because wizards don't do statistics, least not about the well-being of those cast into the outer darkness.

Neville's Gran enters, carrying a little bundle that proves to be Ron Weasley's tiny owl Pigwidgeon, who'd apparently been bearing a letter to Draco, and had gotten most of the way to Hogwarts before he had to divert to Lancashire. Andromeda receives the exhausted creature with a chastened look, and detaches the rolled letter from his leg. Whatever's in that letter must have been rendered moot by the disaster that's just taken place.

After Andromeda leaves, Neville whispers, "I can't do that job in good conscience, but I can't just leave. I promised." She feels the tremor in his shoulders as he weeps silently, and she wonders just how many years he cried like that, as quietly as possible so that no one would notice. Only now it's not himself for whom he cries, but this generation trained as torturers.

ooo

**Friday 13 November 1998**

**Longbottom House, morning**

My first act this morning was to call in to work, to tell them I wouldn't be there. I told them a half-truth by way of explanation: I'd been part of the night in the casualty ward with a … friend of the family. No more cheating with the time-turner (for cheating it's been); I didn't have the energy, and there was little prospect of pulling it off under the sharp eyes of Neville's Gran. She nodded approvingly as I made the call, and I was reassured when they put me through to my superior, who said I shouldn't hesitate, as we were days ahead on the project.

Neville and I hadn't gone to bed until well past midnight. Even though we both knew that there was no chance that Draco would be waking for the next eight hours at least, we were both thinking of _not leaving him alone,_ because after all, we'd almost abandoned him to a horrific fate… very specifically, the fate of Neville's parents.

I keep remembering how he had clung to Neville as we settled him in bed… that pale hand outlined against the back of Neville's dark robes, fingers spread wide for maximum purchase, as Neville murmured reassuring words and gestured to me for the cup of Dreamless Sleep. How Neville had kissed him on the forehead, a kiss more parental than erotic, and only then had Draco relaxed into the supporting arm and obediently swallowed the draught _like a good boy._

For all the difference of sex, it's his mother he must be inscribing on both of us, for I cannot imagine any child, no matter how desperate, cuddling up to Lucius Malfoy. You may as well hope for comfort from an iceberg. I remember once more the scene in the Great Hall the morning after the battle, and it was Narcissa who was the tower of strength, now that I recall, the still center in the tableau of father and son reunited, the watchful one… and even when she fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, her son was still clutching her hand as if it were the only source of reassurance in a hostile universe.

Neville played his part, like the hero he is, until Draco was asleep; only then did he break down, and that very quietly. I never would have known had I not been touching him at the time. When I put my arms about him, I felt that familiar flinch, as if he meant to pull away, and then he whispered, "Not here."

The translation: _not in front of the children, _even if they're in the deepest sleep possible short of coma or general anesthesia_._

So it was in the kitchen, in front of that cavernous hearth, that I held him while he finally let go and wept for his failure, for the wreckage of the postwar, for his utterly compromised position with the Hogwarts orphans. Very characteristically, he made sure I was quite comfortable—not straining my neck or back for the difference in our heights—and then he held on to me and cried. He has the knack of nearly silent weeping, and I felt rather than heard his tears, as I held him and stroked his hair.

There are no family portraits in the kitchen of Longbottom House, but I realized that it was the house itself that constrained him. What a bleak childhood he must have had here, for all his resilient good cheer.

Gran walked in just as Neville had finished wiping his eyes and blowing his nose. I suspect she knew what we were about, for her entrance was suspiciously well-timed.

She looked at me, and then at him, and said that we had had a rather difficult night, and there would be things to discuss in the morning.

Then she repeated to me what she'd said when we first stumbled through the Floo half-carrying Draco: "You'd have made quite an Auror, my lass. Far better than what we've got now." She added to Neville, "It seems you were right; the Aurors aren't what they were."

She turned to me, "I understand that you and young Weasley have drawn up a bill of particulars… and I suppose we ought to be adding the Hogwarts situation to that." She looked at both of us, and said to Neville on parting, "Off to bed, now, the both of you."

Even by firelight, I could see Neville blush, and I realized what he was imagining, as I imagined it too: waking up in his embrace, skin to silky skin… it was rather too much, especially to be thinking that under Gran's watchful eyes.

The elf saw me to one of the guest rooms, with an old-fashioned curtained bed like the ones in the dorms at Hogwarts, only heaped with fat covers and pillows and a thick featherbed… it put me in mind of the bed in the story of the princess and the pea, except that I am no princess and I wouldn't have felt a pea, no, I wouldn't have felt a boulder, under all those layers. I climbed up and snuggled between them. Gran already had cast a warming charm on them; I relaxed in their fluffy embrace and fell asleep almost instantly, feeling like a small child.

I woke, in the early morning, in a room dimly glowing in the reflected light of a thick snowfall. It was snowing outside, the sort of snow not easily distinguishable from fog, except where the lacy flakes danced close to the windowpane.

I had been dreaming that I was on the Hogwarts Express, and most uncharacteristically, I had been hiding from my friends in a compartment with the shades pulled down, kissing a boy… a plump little round-faced boy, not quite fifteen… Neville, except Neville as he used to be, the one who'd asked me to the Yule Ball, and whom I hadn't really noticed, well not as a boy, only the friend who might have a crush on me… or might only want a date to the ball. Only it was my present-tense self, the one who was nineteen by the world's calendar and likely closer to twenty in reality, who was sitting back and looking at those very bright brown eyes and noticing for the first time that they were shaded by deliciously long eyelashes.

Except his cheeks were rather too round and flushed, and his nose was short and snub, not at all as elegant as Ron's, … but those thoughts were mere water-bugs skating over the surface of the most steady, ferocious lust I've ever felt… which to my chagrin I was still feeling when I woke up.

Only just past dawn… and we'd gone to bed long past midnight. I rolled over, snuggling under the warm covers, to see if I could find the sleep that I'd unaccountably let slip, but to no avail. Then there was a soft tap on the door, and Neville whispered, "Are you awake?"

"Unfortunately," I said, sitting up with the covers wrapped around me.

"Gran wanted to know if you'd like to come down to breakfast." I groaned, and said I'd be dressed and downstairs as soon as I could.

ooo

It was a grim breakfast, indeed; after I made my telephone call down to London, we talked about the situation at Hogwarts.

I told Neville that it was far, far more than either he or Professor Sprout could hope to handle on their own. After all, their chief business was the breeding and rearing of magical plants, not the rehabilitation of war orphans and torture victims. In the Muggle world, there were specialists who trained for years to handle cases like that, and struggled with it…

Of course, it's easy for me to see all of this in Neville's case; it's plain to me that he's taken on more than even a fully trained adult could hope to manage. He sees only that there's a job to be done, and no one else volunteering to do it.

He looked at me across the breakfast table with a skeptical expression.

And then, quite unexpectedly, Gran entered the lists on my side.

"It's high time we put that on the Minister's desk," Gran said with an air of finality. "They're faffing about with their show trial, and ignoring the real crisis." She turned to me. "It's a good thing you and young Weasley did."

It's the second time she's reminded me that she knows about what Percy and I did; I wonder if it's by way of Kingsley Shacklebolt or from Percy himself that she learned about the dossiers on the refugee problem and the population crisis and the various unfolding disasters of the post-war.

"It's time we crossed the border and asked our kin for help," she said. "But for now, there's breakfast."

Gran handed over the carafe of coffee, and I poured myself a steaming cup. Black. Unadorned. I started drinking it that way during the war. The stimulation is enough, and one doesn't need luxuries like cream and sugar. In any case, Gran's coffee was excellent: dark and strong and almost Turkish in its intensity.

Neville poured himself tea. Outside, the snow continued to fall.

The elf materialized in the doorway and Gran looked significantly at me. "He'll be waking up about now," she said.

I got up, and poured coffee into another cup. I walked up the stairs, balancing it and admiring the talents of old-time servants who did that all the time, with whole trays of stuff. I put out of my head the thought that our guest (so Gran called him) would expect that sort of thing… he was more in the nature of a patient than a guest in any case.

The hallway was still gloomy, and the door to Draco's room was closed. I knocked softly; no answer, shook myself—did I mean to do the job right?—and rapped sharply on the wood. There was an answering murmur on the other side.

"Are you decent?" I asked.

"More or less," came the answer. I opened the door and looked in; he was sitting up in bed, looking sleepy and bewildered, still wearing the three layers from last night. I wondered if he'd need help washing and dressing, but squelched that thought; we'd deal with that when the time came.

I walked in and sat down next to the bed, and handed him the coffee. He accepted the cup, lifted it to his lips and tasted it; the wry face told me it wasn't to his taste.

"Let me guess," I said, "Cream and lots of sugar."

He nodded.

"Well, you'll have to come downstairs for that," I said. He sat with his fingers curled around the coffee cup, as if drawing warmth from it… and then he looked at the clock. His hands shook so violently that the coffee sloshed out of the cup onto the coverlet. I took it out of his hands and set it on the tray on the bedside table. He tried to explain, but his teeth were chattering; I barely made out the words. It was to have been all night, and by this time… had we not returned, he meant…

His face was dead-white and his eyes bright with tears and his mouth wet and trembling; I was quite sure he didn't want me to see him like that.

His cloak was hanging on the peg on the back of the door. I took it down, and carefully draped it around his thin shoulders, and cast a warming charm into the bargain. Still he looked at me, his face whiter than before, and for one dreadful moment I was afraid he was going to be sick.

By way of reassurance, I told him that he was under the protection of Neville's Gran, the scariest person in wizarding Britain, now that You-Know-Who has bowed out.

Quite clumsily, like a very young child or a very old man, he took hold of the cloak and pulled it closed about him, and then smiled at me, a smile pale as the foggy sunrise.

I told him that he should come down to breakfast. Gran had requested his presence. And Neville was looking for an opportunity to feed him up. And did he need any help…?

He said, "The elf brought my things." I saw his trunk standing in the corner, and the pitcher and bowl on the washstand, light steam rising from the pitcher; no doubt the elf had warmed it for him.

I remembered Neville bathing him the night before and wondered if it were my turn.

He must have seen my hesitation, for he almost, but not quite, sneered at me. Odd day when that look, on that face, is reassuring, but so it is: the mask that says _I am Draco Malfoy and I am just fine, and why do you presume to stare? _I already knew that he cried in the middle of the night and had nightmares about Azkaban. In broad daylight, it was a different story.

I closed the door and went downstairs.

ooo

Nothing is as it was in the post-war; that I know and have been repeating to myself. What constantly I must remember is that I never properly understood what this world was before the war.

When I returned to the breakfast table, Neville was saying that he would personally stand in front of the Wizengamot with a protest placard, no, he would plant himself there on hunger strike as long as it took, if they meant to try those children and send them to Azkaban.

Gran raised one eyebrow. He said, "They wouldn't have known how to cast the Cruciatus Curse if it hadn't been for the Carrows. And _they_ were approved—by _someone_—to teach at Hogwarts." He paused and added, "On the other hand, Lucius Malfoy was on the Board of Governors, at one time. Which wouldn't say much for their morals, would it, except that gold is respected."

I sat down slowly, in quite a bit of amazement at Neville the radical. Gran's expression had now shaded into the eagle's smile, that shrewd pleasure at something that exceeds her expectations.

"Eh, lad, that would be more than right. But I don't think you'd find anyone to stand with you there."

He turned to me. "You'd do it, wouldn't you." I nodded. There wasn't a question, really; in a civilized country one does not send twelve-year-olds into the eternal darkness for crimes they were _trained_ to commit.

I said, "Someone was inciting them. They wouldn't have been so upset about your parents if someone hadn't laid it out for them, and underscored in all the right places."

Gran's expression became ferocious. "What's this…?"

I told her what the children had been saying about doing to Draco what had been done to Frank and Alice Longbottom, and what Neville had said in return, and her look became positively thunderous. "Aye, that's enough of _that_. Not a one of that lot in the Ministry came with me when it happened, and I don't see them at the visiting hours. What was her name, the Auror—"

"Addie McConnell," I said. "She was a friend of Tonks, I think."

"Well, Madam Tonks never mentioned her, and it's not as if _she's_ precisely been overwhelmed with letters of condolence, or better, offers of help. They'd rather forget a renegade who married a Dark Creature…until she's dead, and then they can pretend she's a martyr. And as for poor Frank and Alice, they didn't suffer for anything _useful_, so it's all rather embarrassing. I've never seen this McConnell at St. Mungo's visiting hours." She added, "And I didn't think I'd live to see the day when their names were being used to justify torture."

Neville nodded, with the Stone God expression firmly settled on his features.

Gran said, "On the other hand, we've little to do in that case _but_ Azkaban."

I protested, "But it isn't reasonable to talk about sending twelve-year-olds to Azkaban. Of course, there's no question of letting that situation stand."

Neville said, "It's not as if anyone ever drew the line on bullying at Hogwarts."

Gran looked at him with a measuring glance, and said, "Well, I think that the Unforgivables ought to be that line."

Neville was about to say something in reply, but then closed his mouth rather firmly and fell silent. Draco stood in the doorway, wearing dark-green everyday robes and a haughty expression. He made a slight but very formal bow to Gran. "Madam Longbottom." The faint snowlight from the windows caught in his pale grey eyes. "Thank you for your hospitality."

Gran inclined her head in acknowledgment, and then gestured to the seat nearest the fireplace. "Do sit down and join us for breakfast."

Draco obeyed, glancing with some apprehension at the food. Neville passed all the dishes in his direction, the buttered eggs and black puddings, and I handed him the cream and sugar, and then watched with amusement as he added spoon after spoon of sugar to his coffee, and then some cream. He looked at me, and smirked; with the first sip, he closed his eyes.

Gran nodded in approval as he served himself a modest portion of everything. Neville looked at Draco with that hovering mother-hen expression, in response to which he added a bit more to each portion. I was tempted to laugh, because Neville had him so well trained.

The fire crackled on the hearth as Draco ate his breakfast, with those dainty methodical bites like Crookshanks tucking in: unhurried, elegant, but efficient. The three of us watched him in silence; all small talk seemed to have evaporated.

However, the Longbottom philosophy of life appears to be that any horror can be faced with equanimity so long as one has a proper breakfast on one's stomach. Neville took advantage of the silence to eat his own breakfast, which had been lying untouched on his plate as he and Gran talked, and I did likewise. I caught Neville looking at me in approval as I finished a second serving of buttered eggs. (Yes, he has Draco well trained, and now he means to do the same with me. We're both too thin.)

There was nothing to be heard but the clicking of forks on plates; under other circumstances, that silence might have seemed dour, but as the meal wore on, it began to seem cheerful. The fire cast warmth and light, to underline our separation from the snow and fog outside.

At the close of the meal, Gran said with that intimidating smile, "It's a turn-up for the books, I'd say. I never thought I'd have a Malfoy under my roof."

Whatever that story was, Draco seemed unsurprised at her remark.

"Now you've plenty to occupy yourself, with NEWTs, I'd warrant."

He nodded.

"We'll take care of everything. Healer Derwent will be here in an hour or so." She turned to me and Neville. "I spoke to Minerva McGonagall this morning. Neither of you is expected back at Hogwarts just yet, in the circumstances." Neville opened his mouth to protest, and then thought better of it as Gran gave him a quelling look and a sidelong glance in Draco's direction.

ooo

When Derwent arrived, she said only that _things_ were afoot at the Ministry. She told me that I had had a difficult night and it would be best if I took a day's rest-which she understood I had not had in some while… well, I wondered if she were saying that on her own account, or because she was under the dark glance of Neville's Gran. There was a shade of difference in her manner; she knew who was the mistress here.

I thought about the generations again: Derwent had been a student at Hogwarts in the time of Tom Riddle, and Gran had finished before the Great War, which meant that Senior Healer Derwent was fully thirty years Gran's junior.

Derwent disappeared into the study to interview Draco, while Gran settled me and Neville by the fire. Yes, just where we'd sat in August, but now those flames felt _necessary_ rather than decorative.

She said with a slight, grim smile that she'd be meeting with Shacklebolt later that day, because they no longer had the luxury of inaction. It was all well and good to let reports gather dust on a shelf in peacetime, or what had passed for it, but now the fin had broken the water, so to speak.

"We don't have the luxury of losing another generation," she said, and the hairs went up on the back of my neck. "Tom Riddle might have fancied our children as cannon fodder, but we'd be plain fools to follow _his_ example."

Neville said that he had not been joking about the hunger strike, and I remembered my own voice saying that I would join him… Well, why should I be surprised? My parents raised me with the example of people who did right, at whatever cost, when the moment of crisis came. And if _speaking truth to power_ happened all too seldom in the Muggle world, that went double for the wizarding world, which seems to be fixed forever in the high middle ages.

Gran said that if Shacklebolt had the brains with which he was credited, it wouldn't come to that. There were already reports sitting on his desk about the demographic crisis, and the refugee crisis…

"Population implosion," I said.

"And the Statute of Secrecy is a dead letter," she added. "The Decommissioning of Malfoy Manor has had some interesting side effects. The Yanks are putting some pressure on the Muggle Minister to let them in on the _stealth technology_ he's keeping to himself." She smiled, though there was no amusement in it. "They're less interested in the suddenly unresolved _anomaly_ in the satellite photographs than the wonderful thing that makes the ones sent out on reconnaissance suddenly lose interest."

She added, "The Ministry, more fools they, let the Malfoys be a law unto themselves for far too long, and now that they've reversed themselves… well, Kingsley's inherited the mess. Not that our friend Tom didn't put his own oar in. He hadn't altogether lost sight of _Muggle possibilities_. Lost a Death Eater or two, _investigating_ them."

I remembered the deposition about Rabastan Lestrange, and wondered just who Gran's sources were. It didn't seem the sort of thing that Kingsley Shacklebolt would tell her, or for that matter, anyone outside his immediate circle.

Then she said, "But that's just for your information. From here on, my lass, I'll take care of this." She looked at me and Neville. "You're under Healer's orders, so as soon as this weather clears, a walk might do you a world of good." She glanced at the closed door of the study. "I'll take charge of _himself,_ as well. The two of you need a bit of a holiday."

She looked at me with that dark glance. (Like as not she's not really a Legilimens, but she gives every appearance of it; even as I write this, my thoughts feel exposed, as under a searchlight.)

She said, "I have it on excellent authority that you're working too hard, lass. It wouldn't do for us to lose you just now."

ooo


	48. Chapter 48

**Saturday 14 December 1998**

**Longbottom House, morning**

The light coming in through the windows in the front room of Longbottom House is cold white and nearly as unforgiving as Gran herself. Hermione steps through the Floo at the Three Broomsticks just behind Neville, and squints against that light. Nominally, it's a weekend visit to Gran, but it's understood on all sides that it's Draco they've come to see.

Hermione remembers the shrewd glance with which McGonagall favored both her and Neville, and she wonders precisely how much of their story she actually believes. Certainly, she skated the thin edge between truth and fiction in what she told the Headmistress about that little jaunt to London. That improvised embrace in the café had in fact been a theatrical performance for the benefit of one Nigel Black, just as she'd said, but what she hadn't confessed was the degree to which that performance was based in fact.

They haven't discussed it further, beyond those first gingerly admissions, but both she and Neville are coming to visit their unacknowledged lover.

Gran has a pot of tea out on the table, and she Summons cups for all present. Hermione watches the teapot float from person to person, filling each proffered cup. She's keenly aware of the space between the four of them; there are seas and continents between herself and Gran, a small inland sea between her and Neville, and between the three of them and Draco—maybe an entire hemisphere. He's sitting in a tall tapestried chair in the far corner near the window, looking thin and transparently pale, much his look this last two years, with little prospect that the bruised crepe under his eyes will ever fade. He's wearing black dress robes, the same ones he wore Halloween night, and taking small delicate sips from his cup of tea, with his glance fixed politely on some point in the middle distance that manages not to coincide with anyone in the room.

It's only when she looks in the mirror that she sees his eyes raised, limpid grey and focused on her. An avid, devouring gaze, only accentuated by the slightly parted lips. She sees Gran's dark eyes fixed on both of them. She knows.

ooo

Gran is talking to Hermione, although it's becoming clear that her words have another audience entirely. "As I was saying to our Neville, it's not too soon to be thinking about your alliances," she says. "There's the right sort and the other sort, you know, here as anywhere else. And from all I've seen of you, a Granger is not to be sneezed at any more than a Prewitt or a Black. No doubt your parents know it, and there are offers they wouldn't approve, if they were here to say."

She turns to Draco and says blandly, "More tea?" The observing part of Hermione's mind wants to laugh at the expression on Draco's face, which is a cross between the bleak disdain of the Prince in Exile and the hissing threat of the junior bully she's known for seven years.

He narrows his eyes, but answers her as blandly. "Yes please."

She turns to him. "You needn't look at me in that tone of voice," she says, waving the teapot toward him, and turns again to Hermione. "There are certain families with a name for gravitating to power," she says, and raises an eyebrow in Draco's direction. Hermione is sure that the tension of his grip is going to shatter the teacup. "Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on the powers to which they're attracted."

Hermione isn't quite sure of the import of this, so she remains silent while discreetly sipping her tea and casting the occasional quick glance in the mirror. Draco is glowering with too-bright eyes and compressed mouth, and she can see the tension in his neck.

Gran says, mostly to Hermione, "Now the Headmistress and I have done our best to sort that mess with the _Prophet,_ but you've a reputation to consider, and your own prospects. I talked with Healer Derwent, and she tells me that you've not signed away rights to your work. Or rather, they haven't any idea where your work can lead, and she's not gone to trouble to enlighten them. So if you play this right, you might end a very wealthy woman. Minster for Magic, I wouldn't be surprised, some decades hence, though I wouldn't set your heart on that. It doesn't mean as much as you think."

She puts her teacup down. "She _has_ gone to some trouble to reassure Minister Shacklebolt of your integrity, and he'll be publicly vouching for you. You've raised some questions that make everyone uneasy." She smiles her raptor's smile. "And you've made enemies amongst the usual suspects." She adds, "What most impressed the both of them was that you wanted to see Azkaban."

Hermione says, "I've been listening to people talk about the place since I was eleven. I don't think that half of the people who say 'slam them up in Azkaban' or 'give them the Kiss' even know what that means."

Gran turns to the room at large.

"Best to put this on the table so all three of you know what's at stake. They are going to make a hash of those trials, and we all know it. And things are in a bad way, more than you can imagine." She looks at Hermione. "You have an idea of it. That fool Tom Riddle decided he'd wipe out the 'wrong blood' so-called. I was around in the thirties and forties and I have some notion where he might have nicked that clever notion-only Tom wasn't too strong on arithmetic, and forgot he was talking about three-quarters of us." She pauses. "Muggle-born, one-quarter, half-bloods, one-half. More, if you're strict with the definition of pureblood. Which makes me wonder just what his point was."

Hermione says, "You mean he meant to wipe _everyone_ out."

Draco frowns. "Who's Tom Riddle?"

Gran gives him a cold smile. "Your parents' late house guest, before he gave himself a title of nobility. I think you have some experience of his respect for _old pureblood families._"

He nods. "He told Aunt Bella to prune the family tree. So all my cousins are gone."

Hermione says, "What do you want us to do?"

"First, whatever it is between the three of you, I don't want to see it in the papers again." She puts up a silencing finger as the three of them open their mouths to reply. "I don't know and I don't actually care, except for young Hermione's reputation. I won't have any suggestion that she's doing anything improper." She looks pointedly at Draco.

He raises his chin and stares defiance at her.

Hermione exchanges a glance with Neville. This isn't going to end well.

Gran says, "I think you might not want to take that line, my lad. You've made quite enough trouble for everyone, including yourself."

Draco continues to stare at her. She says, "It's been my displeasure to match wands with at least one Malfoy in my time, and your lot don't have the wit to know when they're beaten."

"Don't talk about my father!"

Gran smiles and this makes her look even more dangerous. "I'm not speaking of your father, however much it might apply. For the record, it was your great-grandfather."

Draco continues to glower at her.

"Not the least curious, are you? I don't suppose they would have told you. Wizards' duel in the Slytherin common room, spring of 1911? Apollonius Malfoy and Emily Chattox? Need I tell you who lost?"

Oh no, thinks Hermione. Emily. _That_ Emily. Draco must be having a similar thought, because he's sitting there in blank shock. "Emily Chattox," he says. "You."

"No, Apollonius Malfoy. He spent his Easter holidays in the hospital wing. It was three days before he woke up, and another week before he looked human again. Completely unnecessary. He could have taken her at her word when she said no in the first place."

Hermione can't contain her curiosity. "No to what?" she asks.

"No to the Muggle-baiting, no to the marriage proposal, no to the attempt to blackmail her with her secret engagement to a Muggle. Sore loser, was Apollonius." She actually smirks, which drops half a century from her face. "The fool proposed _after_ she'd knocked him off his broom in Quidditch practice. Not a very romantic proposal, either. He said something to the effect of 'Emily, my girl, you and I are the best breeding stock in wizarding Britain. It's only logical you should marry me.' And Emily's answer was that a reserve Seeker was no match for a champion Beater, and if the first demonstration didn't suffice, she'd knock him out of the air again.

"Eighty-seven years ago, and I still remember the look on his face."

Neville actually laughs out loud. Draco has a look of shock on his face, and he's blushing furiously.

_Oh my god, Neville's Gran is a Slytherin. And Draco's lost love is Neville's Gran._ She's not sure which thought is more disturbing.

Hermione says slowly, unable to help herself, "Emily Chattox, Slytherin House, Hogwarts class of 1911. The Sargent portrait in the drawing room. That's _you._ And the Quidditch team portrait in the Slytherin common room."

Gran nods, smiling. "An unequalled record, even to this day. Which didn't stop Tom Riddle from moving it to the gloomy end of the room when he was made a prefect, because he thought it encouraged witches to think about matters other than making more purebloods."

Hermione adds, "And you put Felix in Sargent's tea. At least that's what she said. Your portrait in the drawing room."

Gran laughs. "Oh, I'd forgotten that. I was so furious at Mother for making me sit for a portrait when I could have been out practicing Quidditch."

Draco says slowly, "You threw over my great-grandfather for a _Muggle._ That does explain why father wouldn't tell me what you'd done." Clearly this notion has rearranged his world.

Hermione thinks this makes Draco and Neville relatives of some kind—well, nearer relations than she thought they were—but isn't sure what you call it when you're related to someone by virtue of your grandmother having turned down their great-grandfather.

"You're Emily Chattox." He shakes his head, then puts down his teacup. He's still pink in the face, but he's smirking in something like his old style. "And your portrait in the common room is an unconscionable flirt. She broke my heart before I was thirteen years old."

Gran says, "I won't take responsibility for what she's been up to on her own recognizance since we parted ways. No doubt the girl's bored." She smirks again. "And the Wizengamot would laugh your breach of promise suit right out of court, so don't even think about it."

Hermione isn't sure she should ask, but it's been confusing her. "You don't go by Emily any more. Everyone calls you Augusta."

Gran looks at her for a very long time with those dark eyes that miss nothing. She's considering, and there's something else as well.

After a long silence, she says, "There was a little one. I gave her my name, and she took it away with her into the dark."

ooo

**Monday 16 December 1998**

**St. Mungo's, morning**

It's Monday morning and Hermione is facing Boudicca Derwent across the polished surface of the Healer's desk, with its puffing and whirring instruments, the crystal cabinet behind the window in which yet more memories are locked up in their glowing vials. The sunlight that filters through the windows with their sheer hangings is not artificial like the light at the Ministry, but it has a faintly unreal air.

Derwent is saying that she has requested a modification to the usual Portkey charm, in honor of this being a visit for purposes of inquiry… "You want to see Azkaban from the outside, I assume. That's not usual procedure, of course, but there's no harm in it." She smiles a not-really-a-smile, and says, "Very few have ever seen it from the outside—or at least lived long after that."

Hermione says, "You were going to put me under Fidelius for this part. What is it that I'm not supposed to tell? I thought people knew what the inside of Azkaban was."

Derwent says, "That's true in general… though you're right to be asking to see it in person. One can _talk_ about some things…"

She says, "And they do talk, and all too loosely: 'Slam them up in Azkaban,' 'Feed him to the Dementors.'" The recollection of the drunken talk at Harry's birthday party is all too vivid, even at the distance of six months in the world's time and more than twice that in her own. That, and George and Ron both had been in the presence of the Dementors more than once, so they knew more or less what they meant when they said that… except for the difference in scale between the sunlit world of the living and the dark tower that was given over to the dominion of the creatures whose mouths opened onto Void.

Derwent says, "They don't mean for anyone to be talking about what you see there." She pauses, and says, "You cannot speak. You must keep faith." Hermione feels the binding settle on her and can't resist a smirk; the _real_ spell-casters show off by doing it in English. Derwent adds conversationally, "Of course, the spell doesn't prevent you _acting_ on what you may see."

She'd frown at this: it almost sounds like… an invitation, or a warning.

"Of course, you'll be released after the trials. It will be obvious by then."

There is a pause while this sinks in. The fix is in, or so Hermione has suspected for some time. The dearth of real defendants more or less clinches it, and likely that Fidelius covers the contents of the indictments, although…

"So the list of defendants," she says, "Lucius Malfoy, Dolores Umbridge… and likely Narcissa and Draco. Anyone else?"

Derwent smiles, understanding the question. "No one else living."

Hermione is emboldened by this, "So the rumors that they're going to indict Percy Weasley…"

"Are rumors. I think that they wouldn't like what he might say in court. Unfortunately, he knew –knows—far more than Thicknesse ever did about what was really going on inside the walls of the Ministry. They wouldn't like that bruited about in court."

Hermione says, "And he's competent."

Derwent says, "They'll keep him on in spite of that. No, the difficulty is simply that he knows where various interesting things are buried."

"The proverbial bodies."

"Not the only thing that's buried. Treasure as well." She says, "I don't know if they're more afraid of what he'd say in court, or what he'd take to the grave with him." She adds, "I've known a handful of witches and wizards in my time with the steel to Obliviate themselves if it came to it… and young Weasley is one of them." She says, "Altogether a far from ideal defendant, leaving aside that some actually like him."

"Malfoy and Umbridge, not so much," Hermione says. "Of course, I may be biased, given my _history_."

Derwent says, "Umbridge is not well liked, particularly by her junior staff. She has proteges thorughout the Ministry, but a reputation… for somewhat exacting demands, and an unforgiving eye to fulfilling them." Hermione remembers the livid scars on the back of Harrry's hand that spell out 'I will not tell lies' in crooked boyish handwriting.

Derwent says, "And she leaves a considerable legacy behind."

Hermione nods.

"So whatever it is that you do, be careful.. There are still a faction that would like an excuse to send you and your compatriots to Azkaban."

Of course, what she and Viktor have been discussing by letter would probably qualify her for a term in Azkaban, but it's far too late to take that back. In the letter she received yesterday at Hogwarts, it's come to discussing _meeting places_ for the next phase of their conversation; they will be scouting the obscure borderlands that are neither inside wizarding Britain nor outside of it, in order to satisfy the embargo in letter while violating it in spirit. Likely what they're planning goes under the name of treason or lese-majeste, for all she's found no mention of any such crime ('attempt to Banish the Dementors') in the annals she's read. Either no one has attempted it or no one has lived to talk about their attempt.

What she brings: her wand and her cloak, and Derwent warns her to cast the warming charm before they leave rather than after.

The Portkey awaits them; it's an ugly ring of metal with a dull-grey pitted surface, that puts her in mind of a leaden shackle… heavy, poisonous, weighting down body and soul alike.

At the appointed hour they lay hands on it and the familiar tug behind the ribcage pulls her into the darkness.

ooo

The tower rises out of the grey sea. It's a grotesquely hypertrophied caricature of a lighthouse, but there's no light at the top of it. If a structure can be said to radiate darkness, this is in fact what rolls off those walls in waves.

Hermione is seeing Azkaban Prison for the first time, from a rowboat in the North Sea. She shivers, in spite of her cloak and the warming charms she cast before leaving the Ministry.

Boudicca Derwent tells her that they usually Portkey directly into the prison from the Ministry, from one highly secure room guarded by a detachment of Aurors to a similar chamber inside the walls of Azkaban. The rowboat has been arranged for Hermione's benefit, so that she can see those sheer walls rise out of the sea, and the rocky shore whitened with rime. Derwent is sitting behind her in the boat.

She half expects to see Charon at the oars, but the boat drifts toward the grim tower under its own volition, the oars hanging loose in their locks.

For fifteen minutes, they wait as the tower comes closer. "We can't really land, you know," Boudicca Derwent says. She takes the leaden ring from inside her robes. "Hold on to this." It's the timed Portkey that will take them inside the prison for the tour of inspection. Hermione grasps her end of the ring and Derwent the other. After a minute or so, the world winks out in darkness as she feels the familiar jerk from behind the ribcage.

The place is dank, with a dungeon stench that's equal parts rot, human waste, and despair. She feels the ice cold tide of misery take her as soon as she and Derwent take shape inside the reception chamber. And this is only the anteroom to hell, she thinks.

ooo

They're surrounded by Aurors. The commander of the watch glances from their faces to his checklist. Hermione recognizes his face from somewhere but can't place it. "Healer Derwent, Miss Granger. Tour of inspection." Derwent nods for both of them.

The prisoners still warehoused in Azkaban are nearly all mad or catatonic, Derwent warns her. And the Dementors are unpredictable, so if she knows how to cast a Patronus, this would be the time.

Hermione unholsters her wand and draws on the happiest memory—interestingly, it's shifted, and what makes an upsurge of joy now is the look in Neville's eyes on that lonely stretch of moorland under a grey sky. The otter emerges with a start from the end of her wand, glowing with an intense corona of light and throwing off sparks. So precarious that sense of happiness, she thinks; that recollection might not be happy on another occasion.

The commander looks up, his eyes widening, as the otter swims in circles around the three of them. "Very impressive," he said. "Miss Granger. _Hermione_ Granger, that would be?"

Hermione nods.

"Of Granger and Longbottom, is that correct?" She nods, puzzled. It's usually Harry's name or Ron's that comes up in connection with hers. "I was in Hogsmeade when you did the civilian training at Hogwarts. Very impressive work."

Hermione says, "Actually, I'm not the impressive one. Neville's the good teacher. I just followed his lead."

For the first time, the commander smiles. "I knew Alice Longbottom. Neville comes by it honestly."

They turn to the grim business of the tour. They are assigned their escort—two Aurors who are trained in the Patronus Charm—and Derwent retains the Portkey, which is timed to return them to the Ministry.

One cell after another, bodies in the corner, rags and filth and bony faces staring at her with abandoned eyes, darkness and damp and chill—at one point she sees ice on the walls—and then they come to a stop in front of a cell whose occupant neither moves nor apparently breathes. A drooling, dead-eyed mask, limbs sprawled on a sort of openwork litter positioned over the pit that serves as a latrine.

"You know this one, I believe," Derwent says. "Or know of him, at least."

Hermione shakes her head, staring at the face. Beneath the tangled reddish-brown hair and beard the cheekbones and nose are sharp-cut, with the excessive definition of a death-mask. The hazel eyes stare onto void. "Is he dead?"

"No," Derwent said, "not in the conventional sense. Not yet. He was Kissed."

"But the body is still alive?"

"Yes. Conventional practice is to let it starve and then dispose of it. There's no use to keeping it alive; the soul is not going to return." That cool, dispassionate tone somehow makes the statement more horrible.

Hermione says, slowly, "So who … _was_ he?"

"Rodolphus Lestrange."

She shudders, realizing that the shell of a man on the crude litter is the last survivor of the trio who killed Neville's parents. Tortured them into insanity, and in effect killed them. He's ended as the mirror image of his victims, except he doesn't move and there's as little expression in those eyes as in the eyes of a corpse.

As well, this is the man who killed Dean Thomas' father.

"The Kiss was not authorized," Derwent says. "As far as we can tell, the Dementors claimed him by right since he had escaped."

As good a time as any to ask Derwent about the contract, or what she knows of it.

"What are the terms of the binding, then?"

"Lost in the mists of time, or that is the official story. To gather evidence from what we see: a prisoner is given over to them to feed upon for the duration of the sentence; if the prisoner escapes, they are authorized to collect the debt _in full_, should the Ministry permit."

"Sirius Black, then. Barty Crouch Jr." Hermione is reviewing the cases in her mind, she thinks, but Derwent's nod tells her that she's spoken aloud. "Yes."

She goes on, "So I would assume that Shacklebolt was careful to release the prisoners of the Thicknesse Ministry _in full compliance_ with the original contract, so they're free and clear."

"Yes. The Minister has direct control over the Dementors at Azkaban, and full authority for the commutation of sentences."

Hermione says, "But these things aren't written down. At most, the chroniclers hint at them."

Derwent says, "The binding itself remembers, and in any case, the lips of those who know are sealed." The hairs go up on the back of Hermione's neck as Derwent adds, "You have been making inquiries at the Department of Mysteries." She nods, feeling chilled, and wonders aloud if she should be discussing this in the heart of the Dementors' domain. The Healer's calm, clinically detached tone seems more suited to a lecture-room than to this lightless, dripping prison. "They are sentient, but only barely. Only enough to prey. You took your mandate to investigate _sentient magical creatures_ rather broadly."

Hermione decides to brazen it out. "I'm not from this world. I would not come to the subject with the close acquaintance enjoyed by a Pureblood."

"Very few Purebloods have _close acquaintance_ with the Dementors."

"That would appear to have changed." She oughtn't to be pursuing the subject, but here in the kingdom of the soul-suckers it isn't out of place, nor out of character, for her to be making such inquiries. "They're a security threat. The rogue ones don't follow the same rules as the others. They show up where they like—in Hogsmeade in broad daylight—and the Ministry isn't keeping official track that I can tell, but…"

No, this part she oughtn't to tell; the correspondence by Patronus has left no trail, but she has an idea of what's transpired since the Defense Association began the civilian training. Thus far, wizarding Britain has kept them at bay.

"And inside Azkaban, any of the ones that were broken out by Voldemort are due for the Kiss…"

"It appears so. Lestrange is nearly the last. The others were killed in the battle." What isn't spoken: the very last one is Lucius Malfoy, whom they've pledged to give a _fair trial._ The Kiss must have occurred in summer; the _usual_ procedure is to let the body starve and then to dispose of it, but the husk of Rodolphus Lestrange lies here, being fed and watered by some invisible means, the wastes draining off into the oubliette.

It's dark, and there is the distant—always distant—sound of something dripping, a maze of reverberating echoes, haunted moans, croaks, cries. Does Azkaban have ghosts? In the main, the Dementors don't eat souls, only feed from them…

She's making note of her questions even as the familiar lassitude of chill despair seeps in at the edges of her mind; her Patronus is strong but the Dementors hold Azkaban in numbers. A hive-demon, and on the mainland… are other hives, not bound by the original contract or else interpreting it as they like. Already the ones in Azkaban have taken what they willed, in spite of the old compact.

ooo

The Azkaban Portkey is just as much of a shock returning as going, even with the intermediate stop in Charon's rowboat on the outbound. The outward journey was one sort of dislocation (from warmth and civilization to an eternally dripping, ice-cold, foul-smelling darkness), and the return was another. She finds herself blinking at the pale winter light in Derwent's office, and once her eyes have adjusted to real light (how many go blind in Azkaban?) everything is in sharp focus, heartbreakingly: the figured carpet on the floor, which she's ashamed to admit she never noticed before this; the play of light in the beveled glass of the cabinet of memories, the glow in each of the vials, the _light_ everywhere, blessing each surface into color. Even where her Patronus lit her way in Azkaban, the light was colorless (below the threshold for color vision, her Muggle mind helpfully fills in) and shadows constantly shifted just outside its reach: Dementors, or ghosts, or who knows what else that haunts the terrible tower in the North Sea.

Derwent's voice, somewhere behind her, tells her to sit down, and she does so, abruptly, in one of the armchairs, which just soft enough, and in the right places too, and she _knows_ that there are no armchairs in Azkaban and she's never been the sort of sensualist who appreciated such things. There's a little piece of her that's always been proud of that, who sneered a bit at Draco stretching like a cat in the up-rush of warm air from the floor vents in her parents' house… and now she takes that back, all of it, for the failure it was: the lack of appreciation for ordinary comforts.

A cup of tea is a riot of the senses after the darkness of Azkaban, and she accepts it from Derwent's hand: not Earl Grey but her favorite Lapsong Sochong, that smells of autumn woodsmoke in open air. She sips it slowly, gratefully, letting the sharp edges of the furniture, the soft modulations of the light, play on her eyes.

She would close her eyes to savor the tea more fully, except that's darkness, and behind it…

… she might well awake in Azkaban. She repents of the flash of contempt she had felt—and quashed—for the eighteen-year-old boy, her temporary bedmate, who woke her with his terrified sobbing at the notion of being consigned to that place.

No. She has understood nothing about this world, nothing. Her original instinct was right. You do not understand the wizarding world until you have visited Azkaban.

Derwent walks around her, and sits at the desk to drink her own tea. The tea is hot, and the room at a comfortable temperature, and outside is cold, but it's a cold suffused with light, and not the cold of Azkaban.

She remembers the conversation that she and Neville had, months back, years back it now seems, on the margins of the black lake near sunset. At midsummer, and what she had not appreciated, as they talked of the place of ultimate penalty and the _reasons of state_ behind it, was the warmth of that air on her skin and the ordinary hope in her soul.

Derwent pushes the plate across to her: not biscuits this time, nor sandwiches, but a thick square of chocolate, _the standard dose._

She obediently takes and eats, and as the tea and chocolate between them work their magic and restore her ordinary mind, she wonders if it the theobromine—food of the gods—that's the specific against the encroachment of demons, or some other ingredient. In any case, it's a temporary measure.


	49. Chapter 49

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

My work is not finished. Now that I've been put under Fidelius, I have been set to the task of reviewing and abstracting the mass of documents, some going back a thousand years, having to do with the Malfoy holdings.

Most recent are the documents of the Task Force for Decommissioning, with the specification of the now-deactivated blood defenses of the Manor and the report of the Thaumaturgical Engineering Consultant on the result of the Decommissioning. Among other things, the Manor is no longer Unplottable, and there's the Healer's report, that Derwent tells me I should review once we've sorted the financial part.

Then there are the great black account books for the Manor, with the most recent entries written alternately in the crabbed hand of Lucius Malfoy and the copy-book copperplate of Narcissa (hers are the entries from his term in Azkaban). Wizards definitely don't do logic, and Percy Weasley and Emily Augusta Longbottom aside, their performance in statistics is equally nonexistent. But those deficiencies are nothing, compared to their notions of accounting.

My eyes cross. I have wished five times today that I were a chartered accountant, or failing that, that the Statute of Secrecy would allow me to cross the border and engage one. There's a Weasley or Prewett cousin who is an accountant, I recall, and I'm very seriously considering talking to Boudicca Derwent about engaging his services. I can make neither head nor tail of the supposed audit trail for the Malfoy holdings; if it's a trail, it's a branching dirt track whose every fork leads to the edge of a precipice. The numbers do not add up, and I am wondering if Lucius, like the Mafiosi who are his Muggle counterparts, had a separate set of books secreted someplace Unplottable.

ooo

At my wit's end, I finally sent the whole mess to Boudicca Derwent, with the note that I could make neither head nor tail of it. To my untrained eye, it appears as a mass of indirection writhing about a void, with paths winding off into the fog… toward a suspected precipice, I think. But I am no accountant.

Derwent looked at me gravely and said that she would send this to the Minister, with a _very particular request_ for expertise which we do not command.

That was yesterday.

Today, a visitor arrived under escort by two Aurors: a City man in full regalia, dark expensive suit and shiny shoes (whose price I would not like to estimate). The effect of the costume (for so it seemed next to the scarlet-robed guardians of order) was offset by the round smiling face and the fluffy red hair, which showed tendencies to lawlessness in spite of the conservative and no doubt expensive haircut.

Even before he was introduced, I knew who his kin had to be; he looked remarkably like Molly Weasley. The name clinched it: Adrian Prewett.

I didn't know if it were polite to ask, but he anticipated the question. "I believe you know my second cousin, Molly. Of course she's Molly Weasley now."

I accepted his proffered handshake, which was warm and firm and trustworthy. I liked him already, even though his accent was fully as patrician as that of Nigel Black.

"And you must be Hermione Granger," he said. I must have frowned, for he added, "I've seen your picture in the _Prophet_." And then he thanked me for my efforts in the war, in so few words that I knew that it was a personal matter, and not only because of his cousins.

I vaguely remembered Ron saying something about a cousin to whom they never spoke, because he was an accountant or a stockbroker, something like that; I'd laughed, _then_. Of course, now it's clear: Molly's cousin Adrian is a Squib, and I know from the records that the Death Eaters took special pleasure in torturing and killing Squibs. The night that Madam Bones was killed, they also dispatched her Squib niece, Jackie Bones, who had been walking to her aunt's flat, under discreet guard by a young Auror…

… by the name of Adelaide McConnell. It has to be _that_ McConnell, the one who abandoned her post the night that the war orphans set on Draco.

McConnell's case report indicated that Jackie was cut down by Rololphus Lestrange and died instantly, unlike most of the Squib victims of the Death Eater terror. Mostly, I would guess, because Lestrange meant simply to _get her out of the way,_ before her bodyguard could react and call in reinforcements—which she did mere seconds later, but too late for her charge.

Every line in those reports is a little tragedy. McConnell has been suspended from duty, of course, and they're investigating the possibility that death squads are operating within the Auror corps.

But I digress.

Adrian Prewett received the Malfoy account books, taking them up with the care one would lavish on important financial records of both antiquarian and business interest. Derwent and the Aurors saw him to another room, and then we all went back to work on the things we could understand.

He emerged a few hours later, with a request to question the _persons of interest._ Derwent went into her study to Floo the Minister, and fifteen minutes later, eight Aurors arrived to take up defensive positions along our corridor. There was some back and forth with someone in Magical Transportation, and then two of the Aurors accompanied Derwent to her study, from which she emerged five minutes later accompanied by the Aurors I'd seen at the Manor, along with another four, escorting Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy.

_Well, the fat's in the fire,_ I thought. There's a nice turnabout in Lucius and Narcissa being interrogated by a mere Squib about their pecuniary intimacies—and a Prewett Squib at that.

Schadenfreude comes naturally when it's a question of those two. Which is probably why they've been singled out as war crimes defendants, even as it becomes clear to me how many others were involved.

ooo

Well, the hypothesis of the second set of books cheered me for several hours, until Derwent emerged from her study, followed by Adrian Prewett. The set of her mouth told me all I needed to know: the news was bad.

Apparently, she had obtained and acted on a direct Ministerial order to question Lucius and Narcissa under Veritaserum on that and other points, with Adrian Prewett in attendance. A Squib who's a chartered accountant knows the questions to ask, it would appear; as well, it seems that he knows the twisty ins and outs of the so-called Pureblood mind, particularly as regards matters arithmetical and fiscal. His interrogation was both thorough and culturally specific.

There is no second set of books, and the Malfoy school of accountancy is a branch of the Dark Arts. "A mass of indirection writhing about a void." Apparently, I saw correctly. There is nothing more.

ooo

I am glad I wasn't present at the discovery, because on hearing the results of the interrogation, I would have found the animus to perform a Killing Curse on the unspeakable bastard right there. There are crimes against humanity, and then there's serious financial malfeasance. Very serious.

There is no wealth to seize, at least not on the scale everyone was assuming. There is the Manor, and gold in a Gringotts vault, and various physical property, but the bulk of the so-called Malfoy fortune is a mass of promissory notes cantilevered out over the void, and it has been so for generations. Once they call it in, we are looking at the fiscal equivalent of gravitational collapse, because the notes have passed from hand to hand, and there are holders standing at five removes from Lucius himself, not to mention the many-times-removed holders of notes originally issued by Abraxas and Apollonius. It's not clear how much of the British wizarding economy will fall into the resulting black hole. At least they don't have a Stock Exchange or Bourse, or Lucius could have made even more trouble. Mercifully, wizarding debt instruments, at least in hard-line Pureblood circles, are as medieval as their clothes and their view of life.

But there's still plenty of trouble.

There are no funds to cover the Aurors' increased activity in the post-war, nor to solve the Muggle-born refugee problem. We will have to appeal to the Muggle Prime Minister for help with repatriation, distasteful though that might be in some circles here. Likely we will have to request foreign aid from the Ministries of wizarding Central Europe and from North America.

And last, but from my point of view not least, there are no funds to cover my debt. If I read the situation correctly, I am now in danger of perpetual servitude to Gringotts, should I fail in my mission.

Well, failure is not a possibility. Far worse than servitude awaits me if I fail.

And I'm not sure if I will get my parents back, although I may be able to swing that with the Muggle money I managed to save from my job on the other side of the border. Wisely, I did not depend upon the beneficence of the Ministry to cover their travel expenses. But there's still Boudicca Derwent's time to go to Australia, and I do not know if she likes the idea of traveling by airplane, or even how far she is willing to help me beyond my _immediate usefulness_.

ooo

"You cannot speak. You must keep faith."

Now that the spell has been cast, I must keep faith even with the faithless. Once I thought that Fidelius was a harmless thing, when I was young, very young indeed, when all I knew was the shelter from enemies (you cannot speak the name of the place where we are hiding)… but now, I'm keeping secrets against my will, and I am surprised even that it lets me get this far, to write what I am writing now. Of course I am writing under multiple layers of enchantment; no one but me will ever see this page, not if my encryptions hold.

I wrote, didn't I, that the Defense Association had kept the Dementors at bay, in the wizarding world.

There's another world, far more numerous, and someone here in the Ministry has snipped, from Muggle newspapers, curious reports of corpses—not quite corpses, still breathing but utterly unresponsive—found along dark footpaths in the country, in alleys in the cities, in one horrifying instance in a sitting-room in a modest suburb of London. Here and there, scattered, but when I cast the spell that puts them all on a map, I see… the territories of the rogue hives.

The hive-demons are abroad in the Muggle world, feeding and growing stronger.

The spell doesn't keep me from acting on what I know, or I would go mad. In two days, Viktor and I have an assignation on a wind-swept island, and romance is the furthest thing from our minds.

The spell doesn't keep me from acting on what I know.

I wonder if Derwent meant that as a hint. About Azkaban, about these disquieting reports from the Muggle side of the border, about the machinations leading up to the war crimes trials.

Oh yes, and Augusta Longbottom will collect from Uncle Algie when it all comes out, as indeed it must. Yes. She told me they'd had a wager on the Malfoys, yes, well, now I know. Thanks to one Adrian Prewett, chartered accountant, a round little man with fluffy red hair, in whose cherubic features I make out a resemblance to his second cousin, Molly Weasley.

It's odd to see a man in full Muggle regalia at the Ministry for Magic… no, let me change sides of the border and rewrite that. It's odd to see an ordinary London city man in a room full of witches and wizards in medieval robes.

Adrian is an odd little man, whom you might suspect of being a friendly bumbling wizard, except that he is no such thing. He is the child of a witch and a wizard, but he passes for a Muggle. He is, however, very good at his profession, so the headache that I'd developed reading the Malfoys' great black account books receded bit by bit, as Adrian laid out for us what each of the puzzling blanks meant.

"A mass of indirection writhing about a void." Well, that will teach me to trust my instincts. I was right, after all.

The question that haunts me is if the Pureblood holdouts on the War Crimes Commission knew this, or suspected it, at the outset.

Oh yes, and I read the most recent draft of the Decommissioning report, and there's the thing that wasn't mentioned before: the full notes on the Healer's examination of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. More than I wanted to know about anyone else's parents, certainly more than I would have wanted to know about my own. Yes, they'd been interrupted in a tryst, and…

… I'm under Fidelius for this part, too, aren't I?

Yes. I tried to say it aloud just now, and even in an empty room, nothing came out of my mouth.

Narcissa Malfoy is pregnant, was only a few days gone at the Decommissioning, but the defenses are—or were—so intimately bound to the blood of the Family that they recognized even that tiny shadow of a next generation.

_Now we are attending to the children._ Ah, yes, now I understand why Narcissa looked askance at the suggestion of celebratory firewhiskey—it wasn't only the insult to a defeated House, but a precaution any expectant mother would take. And Draco wasn't told—because they didn't want to tell him.

I don't know enough of Healers' Latin, so I asked Derwent what the cryptic abbreviation meant.

She translated. _Sex female, rank seven._

It still made no sense, and I was feeling irritated, so I said as much. No, I don't know Healers' spells, beyond the battlefield basics I taught myself in anticipation of our Horcrux hunt, so Derwent explained it for me in words of one syllable.

Narcissa Malfoy has been pregnant seven times. Draco is her sixth child, conceived nineteen years ago, and this little shadow is the seventh.

Suddenly Lucius Malfoy doesn't look so much like a cardboard villain as a heartbroken father, and his animus against Molly and Arthur, all political considerations aside, snaps into sharp focus. All his gold could not buy what they had…

I did the calculations. That was mid-October, this is mid-December, the trials will be mid-March. Will they send her to Azkaban before or after she gives birth?

Do they send pregnant women to Azkaban?

Or newly delivered mothers, bereft of their babies?

What will become of the little girl, Draco's baby sister, assuming she's born alive and whole? Which, given what the medical record hints, might not be a foregone conclusion at all.

ooo

Walking in the snow… walking home through ordinary London, Muggle London, to King's Cross from the Ministry because I didn't want to Floo from there, and the walk gave me time to think. Wizards scorn walking because it's something that Muggles do, so I wasn't likely to encounter any of the other denizens of that busy bureaucratic hive…

Yes, hive is right, isn't it? The Dementors made a pact with another hive, and I wonder now what was the nature of the perpetuity clause.

What penalties are attached to an attempt to renege on the bargain?

What would happen to the Ministry in the wake of an attempt to Banish them?

It would be serious, whatever it is, because if it were only the Ministry, that's still half of the employed adult population of the wizarding world. And if I read it aright, the whole Ministry is involved. Whatever that penalty is, it would fall not only on the culprits, but on the entire Ministry.

Kingsley Shacklebolt—well, the Minister is not the Ministry, but Kingsley is, as far as I can tell, an honorable man. Arthur Weasley. Lavender Brown's mother (whose given name I do not know).

Percy Weasley, my co-conspirator… who doesn't know what I'm about.

I was so lost in thought that I didn't notice the crow wheeling in slow circles over my head, and then I looked up only to note that traditional bird of ill omen (crows and ravens and wolves following the lines of march of medieval armies).

It circled lower and lower, finally landing on my shoulder. I felt its talons seek purchase, and stood utterly still, that sharp beak uncomfortably close to my unprotected eyes.

It gave a sharp, metallic cry, and then repeated it… and then bowed to detach something from its own leg.

A letter.

No one in the wizarding world uses crows as messengers, so this must be from someone else…

… a sealed letter, a shifting, iridescent emblem closing the furled parchment.

_The Goblin Griphook sends greetings._

One of the handful who knows what I've undertaken, and who has sworn the Unbreakable Vow that the debt will be redeemed if my compatriots and I succeed in our venture, _sends greetings…_

… _and commends to you his representative, who may not act _with_ you but may act _for _you. _

It's Bill Weasley, of course. Again. Only this time-if I read this right-his commission from the Goblins is to act as my recruiting agent.

ooo

The hardest part of this is being under Fidelius, and literally not being able to speak of it to anyone. No, not entirely. Boudicca Derwent is the Secret-Keeper, so I can talk to her. But she's quite as busy as I am, and no whit less appalled by what we've discovered. She says she had wondered for years what really lay behind Lucius' swagger, but never rated him a fool on that scale. On the other hand, wars cost money, and so do power grabs, and that's what Lucius has been about for most of his adult life, as were his fathers before him.

I see now where she put escape hatches in the charm. When I speak to others, I can ask questions, if I'm sufficiently non-specific. That's how I was able to ask Neville about the specifics of the Goblins' traditional retribution, to which people in this world refer only sidelong. When he asked me why I was asking, I found myself mute and I had to shake my head. He understood immediately, because I'd had the foresight to tell him about the Fidelius back in November.

Otherwise, this would be driving me mad.

I'm just numb thinking about what it means for me. Yet the other night, I woke around three a.m. crying about how Draco's baby sister will be born into poverty. I suppose her brother is a pauper, too, but that doesn't matter, really, given that he's going to Azkaban in three or four months. He probably won't even find out about it, and in any case the Fidelius Charm ensures that it won't be from my mouth that he does.

And millions of children are being born into poverty even as I write this, so I'm not sure why this particular one bothers me so much, nor why I'm so incensed at the parents who so carelessly conceived her. Andromeda will take care of her, and I don't think Molly Weasley would let a baby girl starve just because her parents' name was Malfoy.

It's not as if Lucius and Narcissa were thinking particularly of doing me an ill turn when they left their books in chaos… and in any case, Lucius didn't make all of that chaos. Some of it he inherited, and once his Dark Lord had returned, some of it was not in his power to refuse.

ooo

**Author's note:** I have borrowed the details of Lucius Malfoy's financial machinations from the inimitable Silverbirch, in "Forgiveness is the final form of love" (see my Favorites for a link). He plays out their endgame in a manner both ruthless and heartbreaking.


	50. Chapter 50

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

The island is wind-swept, and dark, and the wind carries on it a sting of sleet and snow, with the salt tang of the sea. The darkness is uninhabited; the fishermen's shacks on the verge of the bluff are unlit outlines against the dimness, and Hermione is startled when she sees wand-glow… one, two, three like beacons, and for a moment her wartime paranoia makes her heart catch in her throat… for it could be an ambush, except that there are only a few who know about this rendezvous…

… whose identities she's been taking on faith. But she has her wand, and her razor-edged alertness, and she won't be separated from either, and in worst case she can Apparate back out again…

Bill Weasley's is the first voice she hears, closer to her than she would have expected; the darkness alters the sense of distance. "Hermione."

"Yes."

And now he's asking her what she said to him at the Remus Lupin meeting , and now she realizes it's a password, and she recites what she said at that meeting, and asks him who it was who stayed at Shell Cottage during the war…

… and then there's another voice in the darkness, "He-my-oh-ninny." And then with a laugh, pronouncing her name once more, this time correctly though with a bit of a flatness and twang, because he's been on American tour: Viktor.

Another voice yet, silky and cultivated, greets them, speaking Latin with a Bulgarian accent. The owner of that voice steps into the circle of wand-light, white-haired, with a mustache that would have done an old-time colonel proud, dark robes trimmed with fur, something dark and lush, sable perhaps: Andrei Karkaroff, the Libararian at Durmstrang, for all he has the look of a fierce warrior of the mountains or a medieval potentate.

Viktor kisses her hand, but Andrei gives her a brief, profound bow, wand pointing to the earth: a warrior's greeting indeed. She returns the gesture. If this man, this wizard, looks older than fifty, no, has white hair, like as not he's as old as Augusta Longbottom. He might remember, in fact, the spark that set off the Great War… if the Continental Purebloods pay that sort of attention to Muggle affairs.

He smiles a grim, weather-beaten smile. "You're bold, madam, but I hadn't any idea you were so young." He glances at Viktor. "And Muggle-born, they say." There's a silence, in which she isn't sure that she should say what she's thinking, that she had him down as a young Turk with thoughts of something untried, rather than an old fighter…

Viktor says, "We've been pleased, indeed. My mother regrets we didn't make an offer when we could. They say you're betrothed to the Snake-slayer."

Hermione frowns.

"Always your Gryffindors, eh?" He's joking, she knows that much from his tone. "That harpy from the _Prophet_ had you toying with that little toady of a Malfoy, but that's her way." His smile is feral; no love is lost between Viktor Krum and Rita Skeeter. "Always keen for a story, that one. Whether it's true or not."

"Let me have a look," says a fourth voice, this one female, alto, with a distinctively American sound: Bostonian, echoes of Ireland in it still; the woman who looks her up and down has thick black hair, dark eyes (at least by wand-light), and her smile is a flash of strong square much-too-straight teeth. (That one's been to an orthodontist, Hermione thinks with professional judgment, and a good one.) Her companions are hanging back, dimly lit by _Lumos,_ with carefully impassive faces.

Hermione says, a bit stiffly, "I don't believe we've met."

"You can call me Maggie," she says, in a tone that tells Hermione that whatever her name, it's not Maggie. She wears distinctly Mugglish clothes: brightly-colored, high-tech waterproof outdoor gear, though that's a ritual gesture as there's a magically created oasis of warm and dry air about the four of them.

Maggie looks at Hermione, directly in the eyes. "Give Augusta Longbottom my regards. I'm surprised not to find her here."

Bill says, "She's well-informed, don't fear."

Maggie laughs. "Madam Longbottom has never been anything but well-informed."

There's a rustle of garments; the others in the circle with the woman who calls herself Maggie move forward and introduce themselves.

There's a tall woman with West African cheekbones and smoky green eyes—Araminta Williams; a short black-haired man whose hair hangs down his back in a single braid, wearing a red bandana and work clothes (worn jeans and plaid flannel shirt and cowboy boots)—Rosario Gonzalez; a square-built woman with long black hair and a Central-Asian cast to her face, wearing a quilted down vest and under it a ribbed pullover and dark trousers—Wilma Galtier.

If Hermione doesn't mistake, there's a certain note of faint ridicule as they give first name and last, to 'Maggie's' cloak and dagger identification by a single name. She's not sure how to translate it, but maybe it would be _we know you're famous, and you're only calling attention to it by playing at anonymity. _Certainly Maggie carries herself with an assurance that would imply both power and celebrity.

Araminta Williams says that the Council will be taking under consideration what is heard here, though there's some feeling at home that this is a European matter. In particular, given history, there's little love lost toward England or its old Empire.

Maggie continues, "We can bring forward plenty of auxiliaries. None of them in the least connected with your Ministry." She smiles, though now the eyes look hooded; a trick of the light, no doubt, but Hermione is quite sure this is someone who's placed bets in weightier currency than gold. "The Patronus Charm isn't such a well-kept secret from _our_ Auror Corps."

The jibe registers in a silent twitch of indignation from Bill.

Rosario Gozalez says, "Maggie's Aurors … are not the entire picture." His slight smile isn't a smile at all. "_We've_ been on the wrong side of Dark Magic more than once—and that's the Muggle kind as well. But there's some suspicion of outsiders who come recruiting _auxiliaries_." His nod encompasses his two colleagues.

Wilma Galtier asks Bill, "And your own people?"

Bill says, "Half of the Defense Association was never recruited for the Aurors, or turned down the offers." He says, "And then there are the civilians they've been training. Wizarding Britain is proof against Dementors for the next generation or so, at least in the wild."

That means _outside of Azkaban_. Inside, no one has a chance.

Wilma Galtier says, "How many of your elders are among them?" Her tone is quiet, but the question is deeply skeptical, as well it might be. The older generations of wizarding Britain—what remnants survived two wizarding and two Muggle wars—have a traditional complacency about the _necessity_ of the Dementors.

Bill frowns, and says he isn't sure. Galtier's expression doesn't change, but Hermione would imagine they've lost points.

Andrei Karkaroff looks around the circle at them. "And the embargo?"

"Will be moot, I think, by the time this comes to pass," Bill Weasley says.

Rosario Gonzalez laughs, but it's mirthless. "England's lovely in the spring. Or so we're told."

Araminta Williams meets Hermione's eyes and adds, apparently by way of clarification, "It'll be over by the second of May." As if she were consulting a timetable, or a theater program. Hermione's _paranoid conjecture_ appears to be _common knowledge_, on the other side of the Atlantic.

Wilma Galtier says nothing, but her silence itself is a commentary.

ooo

When the triumvirate of North American skeptics, Maggie's not entirely reverent colleagues, has departed, the conversation gets down to cases.

Andrei Karkaroff says to Bill, "Be very careful in the recruitment of your auxiliaries. They can have no connection with the Ministry, however attenuated."

"Nor with Gringott's," Bill says. "I know. I'm not to take part; I'm only recruiting."

Hermione says, "I'm working for the War Crimes Commission. But they haven't paid me, and I've not signed anything…"

"Ambiguous," Andrei says flatly. "I wouldn't care to have you in the front ranks."

Hermione bridles at the suggestion, until Bill says, "We aren't taking any foolish chances. She knows more about the problem than most anyone in Britain by now."

Hermione says, "I doubt that. There are people in the Department of Mysteries…"

"… who couldn't join us even if they wanted to," Bill says. "We've no right to take chances. And if we don't make it, someone has to remember…"

Hermione frowns.

"For the next attempt," says the woman who called herself Maggie. "No army puts central intelligence in the field, if they can help it. Not that I wouldn't put my money on you; they gave you long odds last time and lived to regret it." The smile is carnivorous. "They paid out nonetheless."

Hermione is offended at the notion that the Americans had been _betting_ on the outcome of the late fight with Voldemort.

She adds, "I agree with Mr. Weasley that we needn't send you into combat. One needn't be a fighter to be valuable, and you're worth your weight in Felix Felicis." She adds, "Which it might not be a bad idea to have in reserve."

"Six months to brew," Hermione says. "Were we considering that long a timeline?"

"Not if we can help it," Bill says. "Some of us have worries about the trials. We think—" by which Hermione is quite sure he means _the Goblins think _"-that there's reason to be ready well before they conclude. That would be three months, four on the outside."

ooo

She isn't sure if it's the relentless wind and darkness that chill her more, or the contemplation of what they're about to do, and now on a well-defined timeline. England is lovely in the spring, said one of the North Americans.

After Karkaroff and Krum and Maggie depart, Bill gives her a bit of background.

To begin, Maggie isn't Maggie, of course, but Sinead Pierce O'Halloran.

North American Minister for Magic, she recalls.

Bill says that it's persistently mistranslated by the _Prophet_. O'Halloran is not the sole voice; she is, as Hermione had conjectured, one among equals, but the _Prophet_ prefers to construct the world on the British Pureblood model, neat and circumscribed, cozy and ancient and settled.

North America is not by any means cohesive, in the way that even the British Isles are, in spite of the Irish Question, and the persistent secessionist rumblings in the North and Scotland and Wales, which are only the distant echoes of old battle lines.

In general, wizarding folk _go their own way_ rather persistently, but even given that, North America is different. It's a Confederation—in full, the North American Confederation of Witches, Wizards and Magical Beings-loosely presided over by something that's usually rendered as the Council of Ministers, which has taken shape over the centuries of the Settlement (or if you ask other folk, the Conquest). The borders of the constituent communities are fluid and interpenetrating. The members of the Confederation differ even on the interpretation of the Statute of Secrecy, to which some number of those communities were not signatory; by and large, they regard it as a European matter, growing out of European notions of both the boundaries of magic and the relation of magical folk to their own.

O'Halloran is one of seven members of the Council of Ministers of the North American Confederation. Hermione has met three of her colleagues: Wilma Galtier, the Minister for the First Nations; Rosario Gonzalez, who represents the old territories of the Spanish Empire (beyond the marches of what we call North America, into the heartlands of the old Aztec and Maya Empires); Araminta Williams, whose dark face looked faintly West African in bone structure but has eerie green eyes, speaks for the witches and wizards of the African Diaspora in North America.

Very roughly speaking, Bill adds, because of course there are intersections.

Magical Beings are included as full members of the magical community; the Beasts and Beings are quite different from their European counterparts, and the North American stance for the most part is one of careful co-existence.

_Very_ careful, Bill emphasizes, which you'd be if you'd ever had to do with a skinwalker.

"They never talked about North America in History of Magic," Hermione says.

Bill's scarred face makes his sudden wolfish smile even more frightening. "Oh, they don't talk about Abroad in general, because it all gets into ugly questions too fast." On a continent that had become a farrago of settler states, the memories among the witch-folk were recent and bitter, and so, quite contrary to the tale put about by some of the Muggle Yanks, there was no melting pot… but a great stone cauldron, with the remains of Dark sacrifice still more than evident, having had but a handful of centuries to cook down.

The generations in the wizarding world are long, and their memories yet longer, and so what is mere history to the Muggles, or Muggle-born, is to them the bitter recollections of their parents and grandparents. Sinead Pierce O'Halloran has connections in the British Isles, not only Ireland but the old witching lands of the North; her great-grandmother's childhood was overshadowed by the Great Famine. The experience of the other Ministers, and their family history, was marked in rather different ways. Wilma Galtier spent some part of her childhood—the more wretched part—in a school that bore a certain resemblance to Hogwarts, but in which she was forbidden to speak her native language, and which seemed more dedicated to suppressing than developing her gift of magic. Araminta Williams, born in 1900, was the daughter of parents born into slavery, whose own parents had been abducted from Africa when the slave trade was yet legal. Rosario Gonzalez could count back through a mere six generations of his own forebears, to the taking of Mexico City by Hernando Cortez; some of his ancestors had been outside the citadel and some inside.

Bill adds, "And here at home, there's too few of us, and too many blood-letting questions, so we all agree to be British and magical together. With the exception of the Squibs, of course—that question's decided privately—and the Mudblood Question." _Of course_, she thinks, _that's what the Purebloods would call it behind closed doors._

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Undated – mid to late December 1998**

After the island, I'm still shivering. We've come to Shell Cottage, for Bill heard my teeth chattering, and I have seen my face in the mirror just now, as it must have looked then: white, drawn, all the color dropped. Now I know what they mean when they speak of someone turning green. All the blood, gone out of the face, and the greenish tone shows through.

The Central Europeans and _some _ofthe North Americans will be helping us to Banish the Dementors… yes, I wrote that, didn't I? I only hope that these encryptions will hold until the task is accomplished and the Ministry presented with a fait accompli. Of course, there will be a price extracted for that help, and I hope that it is not too high.

I remember, suddenly, that Albus Dumbledore disapproved of the pact between the Ministry and the Dementors, and that he refused the post of Minister for Magic three times… if I remember accurately, and don't confuse him with Caesar. He knew the nature of the binding. He may or may not have been able to speak of it… but in any case, speaking plainly was not his way, and more pressing matters were occupying his attention.

Bill and I have _treated with foreign powers_.

A sick feeling, still and yet. It is the CV of a traitor, isn't it?

ooo

The darkness seems actively inimical now, and she shivers in spite of the warming charms. Bill looks at her, and suggests that they stop in to Shell Cottage, and warm themselves by the fire. Fleur will be waiting up…

… as indeed she is, the Veela glow even stronger than before. She's swathed in traditional robes, something in a deep midnight-blue with a pattern of interlaced silver rosettes that suggest snowflakes. Silver and gold she is, by the cozy firelight, all the more cozy for the hoary cliffs outside.

She's waiting up, indeed, with hot tea in a silver pot of Eastern design, with a constant play of bluebell flames under the tripod that supports it. The front room is filled with the smell of garlic and rosemary in olive oil, as if some Provencal kitchen had transposed itself to this northern sanctuary perched over the winter sea. That smell brings tears to Hermione's eyes, for those were her mother's favorite herbs; she had taught herself that cuisine out of books, and on the week-end they would cook, her mother and father, and more than once her father, chopping vegetables at the counter, would lean over and steal a kiss…

Fleur leans over her, smelling delightfully of lavender, and says, "It's very cold out there, cherie. Refresh yourself," and the silver teapot pours a graceful arc of trembling light—firelight and bluebell flames caught in Earl Grey—into the simple white porcelain cup.

Nothing of Fleur's pregnancy is revealed by the lines of those robes, but one wouldn't expect that, given the heaviness of the velvet drapery, against which Fleur's pale hair is moonlight on a night sky. Hermione is transfixed: Fleur is the most beautiful woman she has ever seen, and she realizes that her mouth is half-open. She has a flash of understanding of the foolish goggling of Ron and the twins in that Presence.

Fleur laughs, and sits down. "You're tired and cold. Relax by the fire; dinner will be served in a bit."

Hermione sips her tea, and says thank you, for the tea as well as the wordless assumption that she's staying to eat with them; after the dark island, and the consideration of what they're about, firelight and friendly faces comfort her.

Fleur continues, addressing both her and Bill, who is hanging up their cloaks on the row of pegs by the door, "It went well, yes?"

"Oh, very," Bill says. "It will be an interesting campaign. Griphook will be well pleased, I think." There's a knock at the door, and he glances in the foe-glass. "Ah, Percy. Punctual as always." The door is opened, and Percy Weasley, muffled in a cloak, is admitted, along with what faint hint of too-fresh air penetrates the warming charms.

He smiles at her, nowhere near as surprised as she would expect. The dishes are setting themselves now, and Percy offers to assist, but Fleur shakes her head. "You're a guest today, Percy. And a messenger, as well."

"Bearer of bad tidings, more like," Percy says. He takes a roll of parchments out of his cloak and puts them down on the desk in the corner. "The Umbridge opus. I have it, but so does Skeeter."

Bill frowns. "So the _Prophet's_ going to be printing it."

Percy's mouth twists as if he's tasted something not only bitter but likely poisonous. "Right in one. How she knew about it, or got a copy of it, given that Umbridge's house arrest is the tightest on record, except maybe the Malfoys'…"

It's out of her mouth before she realizes. "Rita Skeeter is an unregistered Animaga." They're staring at her, Bill and Fleur in surprise and Percy in something like appraisal. She added, "And she has a surprisingly good memory for someone whose form is a beetle. I never did work out how _that's_ managed, because a beetle isn't much for braincase."

Percy's face has rearranged itself into a smile that she can only categorize as _pure Slytherin_, which is to say that it reminds her of the expression on Draco Malfoy's face when he was enumerating why her utter ruthlessness made her the sexiest witch alive. "That does explain rather a lot," he says. "In any case, Quibbler Press is going to be preempting publication of the Umbridge Manifesto, with commentary. Xenophilius Lovegood is in seventh heaven; it's going to be a real coup. Umbridge has their entire program laid out: the Muggle-born Menace, and the importance of the Ministry retaining _emergency powers_, and the werewolf legislation—never mind her own ties to Greyback, ah yes, we've got documentation on that, by way of Lucius Malfoy. Documentation as well on the elder Malfoy himself, too, by way of my source in Decommissioning." He adds, "A propos of which, Penelope is still delighted with the way you presided over tea at the Decommissioning. She says she'll treasure the look on Lucius Malfoy's face to her dying day."

Fleur frowns, and Percy hastens to explain that Hermione was brought to the Manor, to observe the Decommissioning and then to preside over afternoon tea in the very room in which she had been tortured, as if she were the daughter of the house.

Fleur's smile is bemused. "A very English revenge, yes?"

Percy's face goes bleak and the expression adds a century to his look, which recalls Andrei Karkaroff, or the brief glimpses she's had in the Pensieve, of Albus Dumbledore the warrior. "There's no revenge for what she suffered. Not in this world. One doesn't go down that path…" Something in his face trembles and then stills itself into ice and iron. "In any case, he'll be dead within the year."

She's read the Healer's report on Lucius Malfoy, but she's shocked to hear this being spoken of in company, what's supposed to be secret. Percy smiles at her again, tight and mirthless. "Cruciatus, of course. There were _disadvantages_ to being the Dark Lord's Number Two. Especially with Madam Lestrange in contention for the title." He adds, with an effort to cynicism, "He'll make a good show of it in the courtroom, of course, because there are Potions to mask the symptoms, and he won't refuse them. The Malfoys are all show, but it's always been a good show. Lucius won't break tradition. Mustn't let down the side in front of the Mudbloods and the Halfies, eh?"

"So there's to be commentary," Bill says.

Percy is happy enough to take up that theme. "Oh yes, our backer's commissioned Rolf Scamander to address Umbridge's opinions on the werewolf question."

"Interesting," Bill says, "given his father's work with the Werewolf Registry…"

"The son's cut from rather different cloth. Much more well-traveled, or rather, well-traveled in different circles. A naturalist with leanings to the clinical. He's been abroad the last ten years working with the Swedish Institute." He says, "Quite a distinguished CV, and fascinating connections. Perdita Bennigsen-Bagshot will be contributing a comparison of the werewolf campaigns of Grindelwald and Voldemort, with particular emphasis on the Scandinavian work on rehabilitation of adolescents."

Bill's smile is broad now. "Ah, a backer with deep pockets is a beautiful thing."

"Deep pockets and serious animus," Percy says, and then turns to Hermione. "I think you'll enjoy the commentary on the House Elves. We're drawing rather extensively on your report, actually, though it's a ticklish question whether we'll be able to cite you by name, or Penelope either. In any case, she says that about half her commentary is Ted Tonks."

Hermione frowns. "Ted Tonks? As in Tonks' father?"

Percy smiles. "No, as in Andromeda Tonks' husband. He'd drop by the tea-time book circle… well, they met about half the time at Andromeda's shop, and the other half at his brother's pub. Muggle literature and magical politics. Ted was a keen student of human nature, and a good talker. Penelope reckons she owes him a good part of her political education. Anyway, the bits about the rise of private property and the binding of House-Elves… that's Ted Tonks. There's also a rather interesting discussion of elves as place-guardians and the connections to Muggle folklore." He says, "He'd have loved to have been at the Decommissioning, I think."

Percy's smile is all mischief now. "Penelope told me his nicknames for the in-laws. Lucky and the Princess and Crazy B and Ralph. Respectively Lucius Malfoy, Narcissa and Bellatrix Black, and Rodolphus Lestrange." He drinks his cup of tea, looking pleased with himself and much more at ease. "Oh yes, and the son. The Clone, he called him. She had to explain that one to me: it's a sort of artificial twin…"

Bill says, "And what's Umbridge saying we ought to do?"

"Oh, slam them up in Azkaban, and crack down on the Goblins, et weary cetera. The usual tosh. Unfortunately, Skeeter et al seem to think it will get a hearing. But we're _heading them off at the pass_." He adds, "And she appears to have had a bit of a thing for Lucius Malfoy. Writes the most nauseating tripe about the Lost Cause and nature's nobility and how the Muggle-born Menace doesn't understand the Pureblood Way of Life." His ironic expression applies both capital letters and quotation marks to those phrases.

Hermione smirks and says, "A sort of Pureblood _Gone with the Wind_, then. Comic house-elves and all."

"Penelope thought we ought to make that comparison, except she wasn't sure anyone in wizarding Britain would get it." Percy shuffles through the parchments and says, "Oh, here's a particularly fulsome bit," and hands it over to her.

She reads, sinks and falls down the well of words. She's a compulsive reader, even of prose this bad, or rather this sycophantic, that makes her feel vaguely sticky and soiled reading it, as if something oily and glutinous were sticking to the inside of her head.

She reads the catalogues of gracious furnishings, and the descriptions of robes at a full-blown Pureblood ball, and the worshipful portrait of Lucius and his lovely consort, the former Miss Black, celebrated both for her personal beauty and the exemplary purity of her line. How that union had been blessed by a fully magical child fourteen years after the special petition of their parents for their early betrothal: a true love match from childhood, Lucius and Narcissa had been pledged to each other before they even sat their OWLs… it did go on. And then there was the description of their young Heir, the words caressing his porcelain complexion, his grey eyes (except she wrote, inaccurately, _silver orbs_), his long graceful hands that so echoed those of his distinguished father… how he moved with the grace known only to Pureblood wizards, how his exemplary zeal for the cause of Blood Purity while yet a student at Hogwarts, and his loyalty to _lawfully constituted authority_ as the head of the Inquisitorial Squad, added a spiritual burnish to his youthful loveliness … the _stickiness_ of the prose got rather worse from there, with its sickly admiration of the Pureblood aristocracy and their _way of life_ in the person of a fifteen-year-old boy whom she remembered licking his lips and staring at her and her friends in eager anticipation of Crucio. _Sexual_ anticipation, which she sensed as well in Umbridge's description of him.

An apt pupil and a promising subject, young Malfoy.

Given what Umbridge did two years later as head of the Muggle-born Registration Commission, those words of praise are probably sufficient in themselves to send _young Malfoy_ to Azkaban. Promising indeed, except that Hermione remembers the way he hesitated when he finally got his wish. To listen to him all those years, he would have been in positive ecstasies to see his hated enemies and rivals delivered into the hands of his aunt Bellatrix the torturer.

Except she knows otherwise not only from her own experience but from the Pensieve depositions… which she isn't sure will make it into the formal record. There are no _pure data_, but only what the creators of the database decide are data.

No different from the writing of history, that.

She looks at Percy. "Disgusting stuff. Of course, racism always looks prettier when the perpetrators have a nice establishment." _Purple-prose orgasms over interior decoration_, she thinks. Well, she ought to have suspected Umbridge of a style like that, given her own notions of decoration. There are certain shades of pink she still can't contemplate with equanimity.

Of course, she did have her own revenge on Umbridge… well, which doesn't bear thinking about. Acts of war aren't pretty, and she hadn't subtle means at her hands, not at age fifteen. It was all improvised, and improvised badly, and it was not skill but chance that conspired to turn Umbridge over to the tender mercies of the Centaurs of the Forbidden Forest.

Nor were she and Ron and Harry precisely magnanimous victors, either. She remembers the former High Inquisitor's twitching and flinching at the sound of hooves… what they had mocked then. Barbarians, all of them… but then so was their enemy.

"One doesn't go down that path." Percy knows what happened to Penelope, she thinks, and she knows as well that he does not tell her that he knows …

Hermione knows herself a part of the cycle of retribution; she flips idly through the parchment looking for her own name, and finds it twice, once in the section titled "On the necessity of exterminating the Centaurs" and directly in the chapter, "The Muggle-born Menace, considered under the light of Blood Purity and sundry other aspects of our Way of Life."

In the next paragraph, she sees the name of Marietta Edgecombe… and cannot keep from reading. The language has that same sticky-sweet poisonous quality as Umbridge's personal presence—she almost hears that "hem, hem"—but she has to read the sentence three times to get the proper sense of it.

"_The girl was an unwilling accomplice to the traitorous Dumbledore, in the matter of his eponymous Army, and she admitted as much under intensive questioning…"_

Umbridge's notion of _intensive questioning_ no doubt included extralegal means. She feels sick, and looks up to meet Percy's look of concern.

"I wouldn't read too much of that," he said. "It's pretty stomach-churning stuff."

She said, "I … the cursed contract… I didn't know she was tortured."

Bill said, "I didn't know, either. But you undid it, after all." She knows she's gone quite white, and she can feel the coldness in her hands.

Fleur repeats, for what it turns out is the third time, that it is time to eat, and to set aside the reading of the political memoirs of Dolores Umbridge in the cause of a good appetite.

ooo

What Percy tells Hermione, as they linger on the threshold on their way home (well, on her way to Hogwarts, and his to Longbottom House to deliver the manuscript to Augusta Longbottom and Xenophilius Lovegood): he and Penelope are reconciled politically, but it never will be… anything more than that. She couldn't think of touching a Pureblood—even handshakes are difficult—after all that.

He cannot forgive himself for that, not when his action earlier…. Had he not been so blinded by the need to believe in Fudge's rectitude, or Scrimgeour's program of bluster and defiance and quasi-legal arrest…

He owed Penelope the real part of his education, just as she owed Ted Tonks. He hadn't any idea of the Muggles or their view of life, until she had taken him to that little book-shop, the one burned by the Death Eaters, where he read … oh, all sorts of things. And realized that Andromeda Tonks' plump sleepy husband was a canny observer of his kind and their ways, with as jaundiced a view of the Muggle world whence he came. He admits that he'd had a serious crush on their daughter when he was at Hogwarts; she was the first girl who'd ever caught his eye… because she was _different_. He didn't know how to explain it exactly, but she looked like nobody but herself.

Andromeda, Madam Tonks, had convinced him that Muggles did magic themselves, magic that witches and wizards couldn't manage… between the covers of their books. They turned back time, ran it forward, imagined worlds that did not exist.

"When _we_ turn back time, it's inevitably a disaster," he said. "Which is why the time-turners were restricted to the Department of Mysteries." He's looking at her quite plainly now. "It's such a temptation to believe that we can make it all up. That we can make amends by just working hard enough."

She thinks for a moment that he's going to burst into tears, but instead he goes very pale and that ever-deepening vertical line between his brows shows stark in the firelight. "I can't turn back the clock and save anyone. I'm not even sure I can contain the disaster." He shakes his head. "But we go to work every day, don't we?"

She nods, and he looks at her steadily, with very old eyes in his prematurely lined face. "And some of us go to work twice, or three times. The committee minutes give it away. Some things don't stay secret."

_He knows,_ she thinks.

"The Ministry's on holiday just now, but you aren't, are you? I think I understand, anyway." He drops his voice. "The matter we discussed earlier… at the Three Broomsticks. Yes. Expect an invitation to the Burrow at Christmas, and take it no matter how odd it may seem."

She looks at him, half-opens her mouth to say something, and finds there is nothing to say. She nods. It's only what she had promised, of course. Only what she had promised Percy, and Harry. No matter how odd.

He said, "Make sure that you bring that which is helping you to _make up for lost time_. Because it will be necessary, I think, for what we will have to do."

ooo

**Author's notes:** The boarding schools dedicated to the eradication of First Nations/Native American/American Indian culture and languages are, tragically, not fiction at all, and the damage done is attested by more than one living generation. I give three major cultural groups of the North American Confederation histories parallel to those of their Muggle counterparts, following Rowling's own convention of magical culture in Britain paralleling its Muggle counterpart.

The interrogation of Marietta Edgecombe I owe to a suggestion, many chapters back, by my faithful reviewer NevemTeve.

It is only coincidence that Dolores Umbridge here and Kreacher in canon (see chapter 21 of _Half-Blood Prince_) use such similar language in their expressions of admiration for the grace of Malfoy the younger.


	51. Chapter 51

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**20 December 1998**

A mere five days from Christmas, and the afternoon is half twilight, some days a pinkish haze through blue-shadowed snow, other days silent snowfall. The days draw in and the castle is dark, darker than it ever seemed to me even all those years when I would beg permission from my parents to be there over the Christmas holidays for the unraveling of one mystery or another. It was all a grand adventure in those days: what child doesn't want to be at the heart of such a story? Especially not a child raised on detective novels and tales of artful hacking, who wasn't sure if she wanted to be Sherlock Holmes or Albert Einstein when she grew up.

Instead, I grew up to be a witch, and a magical weapons specialist, and if I'd ever thought about it, well, I hadn't, but now I am re-reading Machiavelli and having a go at Clausewitz. Friction, indeed: it's friction, all of the parts going ever so slightly wrong, that is the chief drag on human undertakings. The grand plan never goes quite so grandly in life as it does on paper, no matter how well it's thought out: Gallipoli was a spectacular failure, Normandy a somewhat less messy version (in history's view, a success, but woe betide you if you were one of the particles caught between the gears).

Well, I never thought I'd be staring at the same prospects as Winston Churchill: the likelihood of having my name on a spectacular, blood-drenched failure. _It was she, Hermione Granger the Mudblood, who led the ill-fated attempt to Banish the Dementors, and took with her into the Void half of wizarding Britain… it was she, who did more harm than Tom Riddle the self-styled Lord Voldemort_...

All right. I've read enough history books. I know how they talk about the losers. If Churchill had died before 1939, they would know him only as the architect of a failed amphibian landing, a bloodbath rather than the imperfect prototype of a later victory.

I mean to survive this.

I mean for _all_ of us to survive this. Yes, I signed on to this in a moment of self-reproach, when I thought I had lost everything, when I thought that I had resigned forever all chance that Neville would want to do with me… given that he'd had to do with _the other one_, and now…

Well, there are things I still haven't told Neville, that _the other one_ will not tell because I have not lifted the compulsion. The last time I saw Draco at Longbottom House, I offered to release him, but he shook his head no. "After the trials," he said. "Maybe."

I said, "Derwent knew that you were under Fidelius. Someone else will know as well."

"And why shouldn't I be?" There's something almost attractive when he lifts his chin like that and stares defiance. "Not everyone in Britain needs to know what I like in bed." He smirked at me when he said that. "I was pleased to learn that there were spells even swotty Granger didn't know."

"Well, yes," I said, "but they're of specialist interest…" That variant of Incarcerus, for example, whose purpose is to create bonds that can be _pulled against_ without damage to wrists or ankles… From an engineering point of view, those bonds have very interesting shock-absorption properties.

He stared at me. "You're talking Mugglish again," he said.

Not an aphrodisiac, I would assume. Well, at least not when the direction he wants to take the conversation is, "Would you care to tie me up and bugger me?" and mine is, "How fascinating: a perfect shipping material, and quite environmentally sound: one can Vanish it when it's done its duty…"

No, the kinky aristocrat and the magical hacker do not a workable couple make, unless one is interested in comedy.

On a serious note, there are the things I haven't told… no, that was where I began, wasn't it? The things I haven't told Neville.

And now someone is knocking on the door. Yes, it's Neville, so I must go.

ooo

It's an hour or so until supper when Hermione opens the door of her little ship's cabin of a room, to Neville. He's dressed in heavy cloak and traditional robes over his Muggle winter things. An odd combination, indeed. He means a walk in the outdoors, along the lake.

The price to pay for discretion is winter cold. Well, that is what warming charms are for, and the advantage of course is that they are grownups now, persons of importance, with some of the privileges of teachers. Their chilly walk will take them out of earshot of the pupils, or the orphans…

…which is part of Neville's intent. He's been talking to his Gran, and there is news to impart: that she's been talking to Kingsley about the question of the Hogwarts orphans, and the untenable position in which they all find themselves, given the state of things and the inadequate legal system. They no longer can afford punitive measures that would shut away part of a generation. They cannot afford to lose any more generations.

It's only what he's been saying all along, with his actions at least.

And it's time that they faced the inevitable: that they will have to ask for help from across the border.

Kingsley is only somewhat amenable; he's caught between two fires. It isn't until two or three sentences in that she realizes that her schoolmate is referring to the Minister for Magic by his first name, and no doubt because he's quoting Gran, to whom Kingsley is a very much younger contemporary. _Very_ much younger, as in _young enough to be her grandchild._

Neville sighs, and pulls his cloak about him in the sharp blue twilight, and says that it will not be easy. Is not easy.

She touches his elbow, and he looks at her very sadly, and then offers her his arm. It isn't what she meant, of course, and she realizes how many of Neville's gestures belong to another generation.

He says, "And I can't remember in all this… did we invite you for Boxing Day?" She can't remember either; holiday invitations belong to another world, in which she is not wondering about the wizarding equivalent of _Mein Kampf_, or _Gone with the Wind_, whichever it is that the Umbridge opus is, because it seems to partake of both. There are no easy paths in the postwar.

"I don't remember," she said. "I don't have an invitation for Boxing Day. Though Percy told me… there might be one for Christmas." Neville nods.

"So Harry's on the job, then."

"Well, Percy certainly is." She sighs.

"I've heard people saying you ought to marry Percy."

"Well, your Gran said something of the sort… well, that he was a prospect." She says, "It wouldn't be a good idea. We'd only encourage each other…. in our madness." Neville nods. "And in any case, you needn't worry. He's in love with someone else. Quite smitten, though I gather she's turned him down."

Neville smiles, a slight sad expression.

ooo

They walk into the snowy night, always keeping the dark lake within view, and she realizes that it's the same route that she walked with Harry a few weeks back… or was that months? She can't remember properly. Yes, that was before the whole business with the photo in the Prophet, and the attack, and so much else.

She's exhausted, and it must show, because Neville stops to ask if she is quite all right. He stops, and she with him, because they are walking arm in arm, which is quite old-fashioned; she'd be self-conscious if they were on the street in London, but this is in another place, and time.

Neville was raised by someone who got her Hogwarts letter in the reign of King Edward VII, so some of his social graces are of very antique form; in her turn, Augusta Longbottom would have had some teachers at Hogwarts who had been young at the time of the French Revolution.

It still amazes her that she belongs to that world, that she herself might some day be looking back over a century or more. From the Olympian heights of one's second century (_in good health_, she reminds herself) it would all look quite different.

He says, "I remember this walk. In the summer. We talked about Azkaban then."

She doesn't remember precisely, only that there had been a succession of conversations, that had led to that first fire-lit interview with Augusta, as Neville looked at her. Oh yes, that mad flight with Gran, and the look in his eye when she came back indoors with her hair in disorder and the sparks of magic flying off her…

… a succession of interviews with Gran, it had been, and it's not only the progression of the year that made each one more chilling, but the successive revelations of just how bad things are.

He says, "You know, I wondered at what you said, and I did think about it. There's so much we don't discuss among ourselves, you know, because it all seems self-evident. Of course we need Azkaban, because otherwise what would we do about Dark witches and wizards? Except it really doesn't solve anything, not any of the real problems. Not the children."

"I'm surprised that you said that you'd go on hunger strike in front of the Wizengamot," she says. "It seems…"

"Not something that a pureblood wizard would do?"

She nods. "That's some of it."

He says with particular emphasis, "But it might be necessary. We've devoured our own for too long. We can't afford it any more. And it does make a difference seeing it up close… and not being able to stop it." He says, "I thought that working in the greenhouse would help them. It helped me. There are living things, and they need you to take care of them. You put aside … the other things."

She realizes how many of the _other things_ he hasn't spoken. She knows about the ones in which she intervened, the casual bullying by Malfoy and the practical jokes of the Weasley twins, but no doubt there was more.

"I would try not to think about home, about Andrew and Robbie and Gran and the caving club, because that was summer. I couldn't think about summer at Hogwarts. It was always winter here, you know, in every memory I have of the place…"

They're staring back at the castle now, as the wind rises, lifting arabesques of snow.

"You take care of the plants, and it's summer inside the greenhouses, and before long, it's summer outside too, and it's time to go home. Except that Wilhelmina and her friends don't get to go home. It's probably no good keeping them here, except where else are they going to go? If I'd had to live at Hogwarts year round when I was twelve …"

His voice trails off into silence. She can feel him very consciously _not following that thought, _for rather a long time.

ooo

She looks up at him; in the darkness and the dim glow from the snow he is frowning slightly. He says, "I've been thinking about the things you said. Including about the memory charms." She hears the pause. "I talked to Derwent, I mean…" He shuffles, and his hand finds hers, and his fingers press hers close against his arm. "As a matter of professional ethics, of course. Leaving aside that you're not bound by a Healer's oath, of course, and given the state of war…" His voice trails off, and then he starts again, "What I mean to say is, none of the choices were good ones. None of them. You were right to be angry with me. And Gran. It's true she would have given you the help if you'd asked. But of course you weren't going to ask."

She nods.

"Gran forgets sometimes that we're not grown up. Not the way that she is. That's the thing that Derwent says. 'You're a very young person in a very old world.'"

"She said the same to me, at the Halloween ball."

Neville smiles sadly. "That was the night it changed, wasn't it?"

Hermione frowns.

"Because I wasn't there, and Draco was." He shrugs. "Not that it matters. Not now." He says, "Gran assumed that you understood the debt owed, and that you would approach her."

"The debt?"

"For all the times you stood up for me. No one else did, you know. You were the only one. Well, and Professor Lupin. But it was the Defense Association, really, that made the difference, and it was you who organized that." He says, "I talked with her, you know, after you came to ask her about her intentions. I told her that she was right. I was an idiot to have brought up the whole question of the marriage candidates in the first place. But she was in the wrong, too: she'd neglected to tell you what she had in mind. I told her that you weren't likely to understand our ways, even though you're brilliant, because the important things aren't in books."

She says with some bitterness, "_None_ of the important things are in books."

"That's not true. But the things everyone assumes… well, my mother was a Pureblood. So there was never a matter of explaining it to her, after all, when Gran came to interviewing a prospective daughter-in-law."

"Was your mother a prospective apprentice as well?"

Neville frowns. "No, I don't think so. She was already in Auror training when the betrothal contract was signed." He says, "Dean had a talk with me about the whole business, too. He still thinks of himself as a Muggle-born, you know. Because that's what he's been the whole time. He'd have died a Mudblood, if you hadn't shown up to Malfoy Manor."

She doesn't need to see his face to know the look on it as he adds, "He would have ended near his father, he said."

"I know. I took the news to his mother."

"Dean and Luna had a talk with me, about what I didn't understand. He's had a conversation or two with Lovegood senior, you know. Because there were _questions_ as to why he was keeping company with Luna, and with what intentions." He adds, "Not that he was playing the paterfamilias, old Xeno, but he doesn't understand how the incomers think."

"So Luna's father asked Dean if his intentions were honorable?" She can't help the urge to giggle; it's so archaic, the whole thing.

"Well, he wasn't sure what Dean meant, because it didn't look like anything he recognized." He adds, "They finish each other's sentences, and they're inseparable. But he's not of our world, and he's not sitting the NEWTs."

Hermione says, "No."

"He has other plans. And apparently you had something to do with those." Hermione flinches; she hadn't expected that Dean would have been so indiscreet. "Seamus tried to talk him out of it, of course, now that he's a Half-blood, but he was having none of it."

"He's had some success with his work," Hermione says. "One of my workmates owns one of his prints."

"That would be 'Two Wizards Playing Chess,' wouldn't it." Hermione nods. "Percy knows about what you've been about, or guesses, I think. Not that he's going to turn you in. 'One less on my docket,' was what he said."

Hermione frowns. Neville adds, "I'm not going to ask how many people you've set up with forged credentials, but I gather that Percy and Gran have been speculating. The consensus is that Shacklebolt should have negotiated something with the Muggle Minister, so we wouldn't need a _freelancer_ creating Muggle identities for our people. Gran has had words with Shacklebolt about the orphans, and Derwent has put in her oar, as well. She's been run ragged herself, and some of what we're doing _without training_ is best handled on the other side of the border. We haven't the capacity, and it serves no one's interests to have the job done badly." He says, "It wasn't until she reminded me that I hadn't the NEWTs _or_ the A-levels, that it really sank in. And that Great Stone God who was sitting in judgment… is all pose." His voice breaks. "I had to believe that I was in the right, and doing the right thing… because the alternative ..."

She's peering into the abyss with him, the darkness out of which may come a Dark Lord who once was a little girl with pigtails, just as Tom Riddle was once a little boy with unruly hair, just as any of the Death Eaters had once been children in their turn. The devils in the hell on earth are only human, after all, and had once been babies and then small children.

At length he says, "It's the Gryffindor way, isn't it? Muddling through. Charging in even when we know fuck-all about what we're doing."

"The magical equivalent of brain surgery, yes." She shivers.

"Derwent's actually pretty optimistic about that, I think." He says, "You should talk to her about it, because she didn't seem all that ruffled about the prognosis." He says, "Gran has the notion that she's going to make you an offer of an apprenticeship after the trials."

"She told you that?"

"Heavens, no. I overheard her talking to Percy Weasley. The two of them are thick as thieves." He adds, in a tone of amusement, "Slytherins, the both of them."

"Gran and Percy?"

"No, Gran and Derwent. Half the sport is conspiring together, and the other half is trying to outmaneuver each other."

Hermione frowns. "Are there any Muggle-born Healers? I thought they were all from Pureblood families."

"Pureblood _Healer_ families. The Derwents and the Smethwycks and a half-dozen others. But they're not opposed to _new blood_. It just has to be above the usual standard." He amends, "The usual standard being ten or more NEWTs with O's in all."

"Sounds like the Aurors."

"It's more or less the same, except that the Healers usually take Slytherins or Ravenclaws."

"And the Aurors?"

"Gryffindor and Hufflepuff. For the most part. Shacklebolt is a Ravenclaw, but they've always been DMLE."

"I see." It requires a real effort not to sound bitter, and she's sure she doesn't manage it. "Pureblood strongholds, all of them."

"Er, yes." He says, very much with the air of asking something he doesn't quite dare, "Do you… think less of Purebloods?"

"In general or in your particular case?"

There's an awkward pause. "In particular." He sounds miserable, and she squeezes his arm reassuringly.

"Neville, I didn't think of anyone as a Pureblood until the war. Really. Malfoy was a prat and Ron was annoying but fanciable and McLaggen was a lout, and Lavender and Parvati were annoying beyond words, and Ginny… Ginny was utterly fearless."

He says, "Yes. And now she's in a bad way."

She doesn't know if he's in on the conspiracy, so she keeps silent until he adds, "Percy told me that we'll be doing something about that very soon." He says, "And he said that you were to play a part." She keeps her face carefully expressionless. He says, "Thank you. I mean, after what she did to you…" She thinks, _you don't know the half of it_.

He says, "She and I, during the war, you know…"

"Neville, you don't have to…"

"I owe you. I've been demanding explanations of you, and …" He stops stock still, and says, "We didn't quite discuss it, you know, but it didn't exactly happen spontaneously either…"

That brief episode with Ginny had been a foxhole romance, passion born of adrenalin and sleep deprivation and the love of comrades in a hopeless cause and the knowledge they could die any time, and horribly. He knew even then that if they survived, it wasn't going anywhere. She was going to wait for Harry, and if Harry died, she was going to mourn for him. But it felt good at the time. Very good. Comforting.

Hermione nods. Her late madness aside, this goes a way to explain Ginny's ferocious protectiveness. Her ears are still stinging from the Howler that wound up with _"and what's this I hear about Neville?"_

He tells the story, bits of which she knows already, but this time with ruthless frankness: that he knew it was Harry that Ginny imagined when they had their arms around each other, the night they learned that Luna had been taken. For his own part, he was imagining … at first he'd thought he was imagining Luna, because he'd fancied her a bit—especially after they were all sent to do their detention in the Forbidden Forest with Hagrid—but in the throes of passion, eyes closed and those small strong hands holding on to him, he knew whom he wanted, and how hopeless it was.

How hopeless it might still be. How hopeless it had been, seven years… it felt ridiculous when it didn't feel shameful. After all this, with his Gran and the Senior Healer contending to attach her as apprentice and heir… well, that was now. Then, it had been Ron…

She reminds him that she's not with Ron, hasn't been… she catches herself before she says, "in a year and a half." That's how long it's been, at least, in her timeline. What she does say is that she's well over Ron, and Lavender has made overtures of friendship. Things are different. And there are things she hasn't said, on her side, things that might make a difference.

He tells her that they can talk about that later, and puts an arm around her, and they look at the castle against the smoky evening sky.

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**20 December 1998, late evening**

The plot thickens, as the writer of a Victorian triple-decker might put it. Two owls arrived tonight as we were eating supper in the Great Hall.

The first was the whimsical Pigwidgeon, beating his little wings valiantly. I fed him morsels from my plate, and he looked pleased with himself as I untied the message from his leg: an invitation for Christmas dinner, signed by Molly Weasley.

_Accept the invitation, no matter how strange it is._

I wrote my acceptance at the foot of the original invitation, and continued to ply the plucky little owl with treats. It is a long way, in the cold, from the Burrow to Hogwarts.

Neville read it, looking over my shoulder, and smiled. He reached over and fed a bit of roast chicken to Pigwidgeon, while smiling at me. I didn't miss his meaning; he'd like to hand-feed me with treats as well, and delay my departure into the cold and snow as long as possible.

Dessert was served, and Neville continued to regard me with that curiously smoldering glance, even as the redoubtable owl of Augusta Longbottom glided in to a majestic landing. The dish of owl treats materialized (the Hogwarts house elves must know this owl) and Augusta's bird helped itself, then proffered the message.

I am invited tomorrow to Longbottom House, to accompany Madam Longbottom for a bit of apprentice-work, a rare opportunity to view and improve some magical defenses in the modern style. Nothing truly Dark, but as close to the boundary as one gets without crossing over.

That invitation, too, has been accepted.

ooo

**Author's note:** Thanks to the reader or readers who nominated this fic for the Deathly Hallow Awards (Best Work in Progress). Voting is open through 30 December 2010. To vote, see the link on my profile. Be warned: there are over 300 nominations, a true feast of reading for lovers of HP fanfic.

**Hermione's current reading:** Karl von Clausewitz. _On War;_ Niccolo Machiavelli. _The Prince_ and _The Art of War._ Clausewitz made his observations of great undertakings gone awry during the Napoleonic Wars, including the famous Russian campaign of 1812 during which he served among the German military advisers to Czar Alexander I. His souvenirs of that campaign included permanent facial disfigurement from frostbite. Machiavelli's hard-won political wisdom was acquired some centuries earlier, in the warring city-states of Renaissance Italy, at the price of torture and exile.


	52. Chapter 52

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Hermione steps out of the Floo at Longbottom House to be greeted by the small dark house elf, who looks at her with an expression that might be approval and on the other hand might be reproach. She's five minutes early, by her watch… well, there's enough to be getting on with. She dusts the soot and Floo powder from her robes and thinks, not for the first time, that the magical instantaneity of travel in the wizarding world comes at a price: either the dislocation and nausea of Apparition, or the _dustiness_ of Floo.

The elf conducts her into the formal parlor, where she Scourgifies her robe and cloak before sitting down in the tall tapestried chair in front of the window. It's the very one in which Draco sat when Gran had her little conference with the three of them… weeks ago. Two weeks, by the world's calendar, or a little less. She fingers the handle of her wand, thinking about what they might be about this afternoon. She's brought her notebook, of course, and a Muggle pen she's enchanted to serve the purposes of a dictation quill. She thinks it's silly to be clinging to such archaic kit; quills might look quite elegant, but they are _slow_ and she crosses the border often enough, these days, that she doesn't want to be conspicuous…

The morning light filters through fog and mist, a heavy sky over the distant profile of the hill. She thinks about the curious things that have come to pass as they approach the solstice…

A shadow interposes itself between her and the landscape… no, not a shadow but a quite solid body, in sober dark everyday robes. She squints against the backlighting, and looks up… into that pale pointed face with its reproachful expression.

How long has he been looking like that?

He clutches a book against his chest, as if shielding his heart, and looks down at her. "You've been avoiding me," he says.

She frowns.

"It's not only you, but Longbottom as well," he says. "You're taking _her_ advice, aren't you? 'Whatever it is, I don't want to see it in the papers.'"

She sighs in exasperation. "I've been at _work_," she says. No, she's not going to explain to him what sort of work. "And you've been revising for NEWTs, which," she adds in what she hopes is a conciliatory tone, "does require unusual persistence in the absence of proper equipment."

"You needn't condescend," he says. "She's provided me with everything I need." He adds, "Longbottom really has no excuse for being such a duffer at Potions. Madam Longbottom has a quite satisfactory laboratory on premises."

He's still hovering like a restless ghost.

"Oh do sit down, Malfoy, if you're going to be reproaching me," she says. "You're not intimidating me, but you _are_ giving me a crook in my neck."

He makes a wry face, with a ghost of a sneer and something she isn't quite sure how to read, and sits down in the chair opposite. The book is on his lap now (an antique edition of _Moste Potente Potions_, she notices, at least two hundred years old if she reads aright the style of the binding about which his pale fingers are clasping and unclasping). He looks at her, his grey eyes only slightly lit by the pewter light outside.

He tries another tack. "If you're going to have me under Fidelius on the subject of whatever naughty things we've done," he says, "you really ought to make it worth your while."

She still isn't entirely comfortable with the notion that Malfoy fancies her, let alone that he's striking the pose of the seduced and abandoned lover… abandoned twice, though she's not sure of the count of seductions. She's inclined to believe Neville's version of events, as it seems more likely it was Draco who provoked things with him. She, on the other hand, is the one who propositioned Draco.

She looks at him: he looks cold, and pinched, and rather miserable. Well, not surprising, given what happened to him not very long ago… the winter light makes him look washed out, and there are still greyish bruised hollows under his eyes. His gaze rests on her, as it did two weeks ago, avid and unwavering, but there's a slight tremor about his mouth.

She reaches across and pats his hand, and feels the tension in it. Before she can pull back, he grasps her wrist. "They'll be leaving me to it soon enough," he whispers. He looks at her and licks his lips. "Something's on the wind," he says. "Of course, they won't tell me what it is."

She shakes her head. "I haven't the faintest notion what you're talking about."

"My aunt. The renegade. She was here the other day, to tell me that my parents have _something to tell me_. But of course she can't be bothered to tell me what it is. That would be spoiling the surprise." His mouth twists as if tasting something bitter. "They're to visit for Yule. It's nothing good, I'm sure."

Hermione has a good idea what it might be, but there's no question of telling him (or anyone, for that matter); she can feel the Fidelius close her throat even as she thinks about telling. Ah yes, Derwent knows her business with that spell.

"Ah, you've been waiting, have you? Unavoidable delay…. That lot in the Ministry," says Gran, as she comes in, shedding her outdoor cloak. She nods to Draco. "That's a good lad, keeping our guest occupied." It's clear from her expression, and his, that she has a good idea what might have been said. "I'm afraid we must go directly."

Draco stares at Hermione, and then at Gran, and with pointed slowness, relinquishes Hermione's hand.

ooo

"So, is he paying court to you again?" Gran asks as they walk into the kitchen to the Floo.

Hermione shakes her head, not quite sure if she's telling the truth. "He's distressed about his aunt's visit."

Gran nods. "The House of Black does love its mystification." She shakes her head. "Always did. Though I must make an exception for Andromeda. She's a capable lass, and I did like her Dora. A real Auror, that one." She looks reminiscent for a moment. "A shame, all of it, a great shame."

They step through the Floo, Gran ahead of her announcing in her unmistakable contralto, "Twelve Grimmauld Place."

ooo

They step out into the kitchen with its long table, and come face to face with Harry, accompanied by the old house-elf Kreacher, down from Hogwarts.

Hermione and Harry make eye contact for one supremely awkward moment, then glance away. Gran makes her apologies for their delay—unavoidable business at the Ministry—and says to Harry, "So this is an unexpected pleasure, as I was telling our Hermione. One of the finest sets of modern defenses in Britain." She adds, "Though I understand, you have some very particular modifications you wish to make, to meet needs of the post-war."

Harry nods, looking ill at ease; Hermione isn't sure if it's she or Gran who is the cause of it.

ooo

The specifications, what of them are written down at any rate, are in the library. Gran shakes her head over them. "Of course this isn't the whole of it," she says. "It never is, thought it's better documented than Malfoy Manor. As one would expect."

Harry says that there are only one or two things he wants to modify, the most important of which is to make the place proof against Dementors.

For the first time, Gran frowns, and Hermione finds herself echoing that expression. "You'll need someone who can cast a corporeal Patronus," Gran says.

Harry shakes his head. "But they were able to shut them out at Hogwarts," he says. "I remember that Dumbledore banned them from the grounds."

"Hogwarts is rather a different case," Gran says. "Unfortunately, no one outside the Department of Mysteries has access to that information… and it's not clear how many Unspeakables do …"

Harry frowns. "Percy said you were an expert on household defenses."

She says, "A _civilian_ expert."

Hermione adds, "From all I've read, there are things they don't tell." Both Gran and Harry are looking at her. "For the Sentient Beings Committee," she says. "In the line of duty. But there are things that don't appear to be written down. If you want defense around the clock, you'll need a night watch to cast a Patronus, and have them relieved in the morning ..."

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Late December 1998 (some days before Christmas)**

"Madam Longbottom has never been anything but well-informed." O'Halloran's remark keeps haunting me at odd times now, but especially this afternoon. There was nothing to be done about Harry's request for defenses against Dementors, but there were other matters. She watched me as I followed her lead in testing the defenses, and once or twice I saw her narrow her eyes. Yes, I've been through this ritual once before, in suburban London of all places, but I tried to look less experienced than I was.

The problem is that I've never been a particularly good actor, and Madam Longbottom's eyes are both sharp and experienced. It probably doesn't hurt that she's a Slytherin and as such appreciates misdirection as an art form.

Kreacher appeared to have been mollified somewhat in the matter of blood-traitors and Mudbloods in the sacred precincts, for he dealt with Madam Longbottom without cringing or sideways insult. Of course, it helps immensely that she is a Pureblood witch, and that her kin appear on the family tapestry, and that her grandson was one of those who had had helped to bring down the killer of brave Master Regulus.

I keep forgetting how very personal and feudal are the loyalties in this world, so Kreacher tolerates my presence because of my own connection to the avenging of his long-dead young master. It's clear that he finds me repugnant, in a thoroughly _racial_ way, having absorbed the notions of Mistress Walburga on bloodline, the sacredness of the Ancient and Most Noble House, even though they have done nothing but oppress him… no, the kind acts (generally self-interested) stand out against the background like candle-flames in darkness, Miss Cissy and Miss Bella, the latter of whom he seems to regret in spite of her alliances.

A note from my subsequent reading: The binding of house-elves is actually intimately tied up with the magic of place and property. My intuition was correct: the elves were once place-guardians, and before places were bound to wizarding families, the elf and human inhabitants co-existed. Like so many other arrangements, that one was up-ended by the institution of private property in land. Ted Tonks appears to have been quite right in that respect. It's not clear that a Marxist perspective explains everything about the house elves, but it does ask some of the right questions: about the notion of property, and what came before, and (by implication) what might come after.

Harry is uneasy with me, still, not having expected my presence when (on Percy's advice, apparently) he engaged the services of Madam Longbottom. We successfully avoided each other, by keeping to the roles of the client and the consultant's apprentice.

Until the last, when he turned to me and said, "So we can expect you for Christmas dinner?"

I nodded, and it suddenly dawned on me that the invitation only had Molly's signature on it; it was Harry who had extended it. Harry the prestige son-in-law was exercising his influence.

ooo

Gran took me aside afterward, in her study at Longbottom House, and reminded me of my other invitation, for Boxing Day.

Then she said, "You've a bit of experience in our line, haven't you?"

I frowned.

"You understand more than you tell. That's all to the good, but there are dangers." Something about the way that she said that reminded me of the other set of defenses I knew, the ones that had been built in my parents' house. She continued, "You gave yourself away, the first time we handled the homunculi. Uncanny things they are, but you didn't flinch." And I remembered, very dimly, just how uncanny I had found them the first time, but it was wartime, and one doesn't flinch any more than one does from field-surgery.

Instead, I said, "So you're serious, then, about attaching me as an apprentice. Depending on the NEWTs, of course."

Gran nodded, and said, "The NEWTs are really pro forma in your case." She added, "The plural of Horcrux is not generally a question on the NEWTs."

Nor is the process of making one, though regrettably I know more than I would like about that. It's one of many unsavory things that play themselves out behind my closed lids as I'm falling asleep. Though probably I should be grateful that with the passing of time, my nightmares have become more abstract, and less… vivid. I notice, as I re-read these pages, that Bellatrix Lestrange has not risen from the dead to torment me, in recent times.

No, it does help that I have the distraction of contemplating something worse.

She waved her wand, a short offhand flick, and the roll-top desk snapped open. From one of the many cubbyholes she brought forth a parcel the size of one's palm.

"Bill Weasley brought this," she said.

It was very, very heavy. I remembered that there had been a promise of certain volumes that one ought not to request in writing… when Viktor came to London for the trials. Presumably there was enough of a sense of urgency that the timeline had been moved up.

She added, "By way of a mutual acquaintance, he said." She handed me the sealed note that went with it, apparently.

The seal was the mark of Gringott's, and the note in Bill's hand. It explained that the contents had been conveyed to him by Andrei Karkaroff and it might be best if those volumes remained away from Hogwarts, as they conspicuously did not belong to the library there… and as if to underline the situation, the note vanished into smoke once I had read it.

Gran watched as I restored the parcel to its original size: a tower of books half my height. I gasped, actually, as it _had_ had a lightening charm on it. The tomes were bound in dragon-hide with the Durmstrang coat of arms glowing in it. No, Bill was quite right; those books, even glamoured, had no place at Hogwarts.

She said, "Quite right he is. The castle would recognize those."

I said, "I have a place for them." My parents' house, of course; the Ministry might think to search Longbottom House for this short course in the Dark Arts, but as for that nondescript house in the London suburbs… yes, safe enough. And in any case, no one will get through the defenses of that place and live to tell the tale.

Gran raised one eyebrow, but didn't object. "I'd warrant you could qualify on the Durmstrang exams, as well," she said. "Though what you and Bill Weasley have in mind would certainly trump anything they'd ask you to do in the way of Dark Arts."

ooo

Once I was safe home, with the tower of borrowed Durmstrang grimoires incongruously stacked in a corner of my parents' bedroom, I sent my Patronus to Bill Weasley with one question: was Augusta Longbottom safe? that is, was she one of ours?

Yes, the answer came back (and luckily no one can forge a Patronus): "Yes, she's one of ours, and we'll be able to depend on her when the time comes. In the meantime, _read_."

Never has anyone given me an order that was easier to follow. I walked through the house, turning on all the lights, then looked through the stack of books. Andrei Karkaroff had tucked a parchment with preliminary suggestions inside the cover of the topmost volume. Very well, then, I would begin. The lamps were lit for the moment when I would loop back through time and occupy those other rooms.

With a time-turner, I could hope to do my preliminary research in a single night.

ooo

Author's note: Thanks to the reader or readers who nominated this fic for the Deathly Hallow Awards (Best Work in Progress). Voting is open through 30 December 2010. To vote, see the link on my profile. Be warned: there are over 300 nominations, a true feast of reading for lovers of HP fanfic.


	53. Chapter 53

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Early hours of Christmas Day, 1998**

**Just past two o'clock in the morning**

To every reaction, an equal and opposite reaction. I have been reading all night, under electric light, with pauses to sleep. Copies of me are sleeping in various of these rooms, or reading, past or present or future. I lose track of which I am. No, I am the one in the lead, I think. I am the one ahead of the ones I've left behind, the version of me that walked into another empty room and flipped the time-turner back as many turns as would take me… to five minutes after I walked in here, hours ago, and turned on the lamps in anticipation of my arrival.

My parents raised me to be thrifty, after all, and it is real and tangible resources that are eaten by a lamp burning in an empty room: the long-gone forests of coal or oil, the slow burn of radioactive decay… Something burning away in void, that haunts me, the notion of waste. A sin.

Original sin: to inquire after what humans were not meant to know. Faust or Edward Teller or Merlin, I cannot remember which I am imitating just now: perhaps all three.

To each reaction, an equal and opposite reaction. The primitive terror of not-us, the outer darkness, bred the witch hunts—and some of that, I know, was the primitive hatred of male for female, the one that I never have understood, for we're all the same stuff, aren't we?

Aren't we?

And then the witch-folk withdrew, in terror of their fellows' blind thirst for annihilation, and in self-defense called up… the very avatars of Annihilation, the creatures whose mouths open on Void, who can make any of us, as nothing: everything that we've ever dreamed or felt sinks into utter void, the place of no-feeling, and in the extreme, no-being.

On my mother's high shelves, higher even than the Amnesty International reports and the histories of the continental genocides and the books and pamphlets of the Nuclear Freeze movement, stood the paperbacks from her university days. She didn't read philosophy, not formally (too abstruse a pursuit for the child of lower-class strivers, who needed to find a profession, but she read it for pleasure). There was one I still remember: _Being and Nothingness_, and as a child, I spotted it up there and asked her how anyone could know about Nothing, because it wasn't there.

Void is the true nature of Evil. In the middle ages, they understood that. I've looked at the face of death, but the face of Void is different… it isn't there. Neither black nor white, but _not there_.

My skin crawls thinking about it. Much easier here, of course, under electric light, because one can reason oneself into being reasonable. We are rational. It's the twentieth century — well, the last dying tag-end of it, never mind what may fall apart at the turn of the millennium; for all we know, the reactors in Siberia may melt down when the numbers turn over to 2000.

At Hogwarts, at my flickering fireside, all of this would be much more difficult. There, the light shifts, in the reddish end of the spectrum, leaping and flickering like a living thing, and the Floo powder turns it cold emerald green, and renders the flame harmless —

I wonder (historical note to be pursued on return to Hogwarts) in what order those were discovered: the flame-freezing charm and Floo powder? They seem related, now that I think about it.

Now that I think about anything, it is to escape what stares me down: the face of Annihilation.

I wish I had studied at Durmstrang Institute. Well, I would not have been admitted, I don't think, being both English and Muggle-born. But there is a certain stern and unwavering willingness to look upon the Terrible, in that snow-bound place with its great fires and its fur-swathed students… well, yes, and I do admit once to having daydreamed of romantic interludes with Viktor Krum, naked under furs by a great roaring hearth. There's something in the cast of his face I always found charming, that glower of heavy brows and beaked nose, the high Slavic cheekbones and the oddly expressive mouth.

I dreamed those dreams very much later, of course; my imagination didn't extend to male nudity when I was fourteen. I was very much more interested in the naked face of Fact, of the things suppressed… such as the teaching of Necromancy.

"It is only the Banishing Rite they teach us," he had said, as we whirled in the sparkling wonderland of the Yule Ball. "That is dangerous enough in itself."

"Why is that?" I asked, looking up at him. His eyes were fixed on the middle distance, looking at something terrible that I could not see—and that I wanted him to describe.

"To Banish, one must rightly Name," he said. "Foolish children think that's a light matter." He was glowering, and this time it was personal; there were Draco and Pansy near us, the latter of whom caught my eye and childishly stuck out her tongue. I half-laughed, and Viktor smiled slightly. "A very, very foolish child," he said, "and I don't mean that little girl, but her cavalier."

I didn't learn until years later the depths of the contempt in which Viktor held Draco Malfoy, who had apparently been so foolish as to assume that a Durmstrang student was necessarily an admirer of the Dark Wizard of the Continent. I wondered that Draco was still alive, after praising Grindelwald to Viktor Krum.

Outside it's snowing. At Durmstrang, no doubt, it's a picturesque and magical blizzard. I did love that picture, the world sunk in a wolf-howling, demon-haunted snowfall, cut off from the outside fully half the year… I would not have minded that isolation, not when its consolations included of one of the finest libraries in magical Europe. A true outpost of the Middle Ages, in the territory of Kafka and Kepler….

I shivered. I still love the antique scratch of quill on parchment, and even more when I hear it as I'm reading the track of long-dead scribes across parchment older than most of London, but… what these leaves tell, I don't want to contemplate.

I am circling about it. Void. That is what I'm contemplating: Nothing, and how we may banish the animate gateways to Annihilation.

ooo

I looked up just now, and startled at my face in the mirror: hollow eyes and cheeks, the lines of the skull more than evident. It's true: my own death will have my bone structure. Dean tells me that's the whole art of the portrait. Find the bones: draw the sitter's death, and then lay over that the softening layer of flesh and the play of gesture that brings it alive. That double portrait of Blaise and Draco was sketched in sixth year, when I now know that Draco was contemplating his own end, and his mother's, in the shape of the mission that at the outset had seemed an honor. Dean tells me that he couldn't take his eyes off Draco's face that year. There are many, many drawings of Draco in Dean's portfolio, and that picture, for all of its apparent frivolity, has an echo of _momento mori_ even if one doesn't know the principals.

Blaise Zabini is dead these six months. Draco Malfoy would be dead twice over, but for my actions, and Neville's.

I'm shivering. It's late night, and winter, and of course I keep the house cool to economize, but it's a more than physical chill.

The demon-banishers of Durmstrang have a conjecture as to the True Name of the hive-demon; it is a cousin to the one of ancient state, whose name is Legion.

I dare not say it aloud, for fear of Summoning them.

These books terrify me. I feel the urge to chalk a pentagram around my desk, lest I be unprotected … should I murmur something under my breath while reading.

ooo

**Four o'clock in the morning, Christmas Day. **

Unto us a child is born. The last enemy to be defeated is death.

Vanity and chasing after wind. Something that howls in the desert places, the voice of emptiness, the song of Annihilation.

These books are unclean. No, they are the means to banishing that which… that with which the Ministry has defended itself against its own these three hundred years.

A hive-demon, which recognizes the Ministry as its own, and with which each successive Minister has renewed vows. The Minister is nothing to them but a specialized function, no more an individual than a termite queen. An organ, no more.

"Like bees in a hive, less the queen." The Dementors are indistinguishable one from the other; there is no hierarchy that can be marked out by human eye. They reproduce in a miasma of fear and despair, and they know neither male nor female. I shiver at that thought as I never did contemplating the lives and loves of insects or fungus or microbes.

Dark Creatures—those sentient creatures whose whole being is malevolent. Werewolves are incorrectly so classified; they are merely human most of the month, and only a thirtieth of their lives is taken up by destruction. They do better, in that regard, than some substantial number of those who call themselves fully human.

Remus Lupin, for example, for one very sad example: worn-down and shabby and harrowed by guilt for what he may have done when he couldn't remember, and for what he had failed to do when he could remember.

ooo

**Six o'clock in the morning on Christmas Day. **

I slept a little, we slept a little; there are six others of me, seven of us in all, Tom-Riddle-Horcrux-fashion, and we have been reading all night, with breaks for sleep. There will be light soon, and all of this will be easier to bear.

The conclusion is inescapable, however: if we are to succeed in Banishing the Dementors without annihilating every human being in the Ministry _and his or her children_, we must persuade the Ministry… to dissolve itself. The compact is, in fact, mutual assured destruction.

The Dementors of Azkaban, and those abroad in the land, rogue-fashion, are a Hive-Demon, and know no fashion of existence except for the hive. We are human beings, who voluntarily form ourselves into hives… which call themselves institutions, or nations, or governments, or corporations, but which have existence only as long as we believe in them.

"The urge to destruction is _also_ a creative urge." (Emphasis mine.) Much quoted, and usually out of context—but the original sentence stands at the end of an essay on the _logical necessity_ of political opposition. The greater the tyranny, the greater the opposition it rouses in answer.

In this case, it is the escape clause… the strait and narrow path to salvation. The one in a billion chance…

I have never been so cold in my life.

I am done with reading. There is an invitation to dinner awaiting me. More than dinner, of course—a guerrilla raid, a rescue, Percy summoning us to help him to save his sister, who is being poisoned by her own kin.

Very much more cheerful to contemplate than the face of Annihilation .

ooo

**At Hogwarts, 1 pm**

Neville departed for Longbottom House a few hours ago. I'm still thinking about that goodbye in the apprentices' corridor. He reminded me of the invitation for Boxing Day, breakfast, which given that it's Gran, means eight o'clock, and then a walk after… Gran will be doing correspondence into the early afternoon, he said, and I didn't miss that he held my hand while reminding me.

I don't know how to describe how he looked, except to list the details: the little smile, the way his hair fell over his face, and he kept brushing it back. He's still wearing that antique hair-clasp in onyx and silver—Death Eater colors, I thought, though of course that's anachronistic, because that clasp was fashioned centuries before the Statute of Secrecy, let alone any of the after-echoes that led to the Knights of Walpurgis and the Daughters of Hecate and Gellert Grindelwald and Tom Riddle.

There is something wrong with me, perhaps, if I can't look at a boy I fancy without thinking about wizarding history. He's part of it, of course, as are his parents, whom he will be visiting in St. Mungo's today with his Gran, before they return to Lancashire for the traditional Christmas dinner with the usual collection of elderly kin, Algie and Enid and the rest. Oh yes, and Draco Malfoy. I don't envy Draco, actually, given what Neville has told me about the typical Longbottom Christmas dinners.

Bright eyes and pink cheeks and oh yes, broad shoulders, and those large gentle hands… well, I do admit that I fancy Neville Longbottom, Pureblood genealogy and all, and I'm pleased that I will be standing shoulder to shoulder with his redoubtable Gran when we take on the avatars of Annihilation… when we attempt the Banishing of the Dementors.

When we _succeed_, because there is no alternative. And I'm reassured, looking at Neville, because he's always been about life, and hope, and the nurturing of living things, whether plants or children: what stands against the Void.

I wonder if Draco will take the opportunity of Neville's visit, to make one more appeal to him… odd that he complained to me that Neville turned him down. Very like a child going from one parent to another in search of treats… no, that's not a good analogy, or at least one with which I'm comfortable.

"They'll be leaving me to it soon enough," he said to me, and I realize that he means _they'll be turning me over to the Dementors_. He wants that last taste of life before he's abandoned to the darkness.

And Neville and I both have made use of him. That's how it looks, no doubt, from his point of view. He's been seduced and abandoned, and he wants to be re-admitted … except he's been the middle term. He talked me into impersonating what Neville is not: the terrible Slayer of Nagini (if Voldemort's familiar was terrifying, then the one who did away with it must be more fearsome yet.) Except, of course, that he didn't reckon on my being the scarier of the two. Oh yes, make no mistake about it, Neville has potential, but it's clear enough to me, seeing him from the inside and the outside, that he's terrified of what he could do, and keeps that volcanic fire banked, to pass for domestic warmth.

Domestic warmth that I wouldn't mind cuddling up to. Yes, I can't blame Draco too much — who wouldn't want that?

I felt my face flame, because I was in fact imagining, or remembering, Neville without his clothes, only adding the tactile track to that visual recollection, hot bare skin against mine … except that hadn't been him, but Draco in disguise.

What I haven't told Neville.

"Are you quite all right?" Neville asked, holding both my hands.

I nodded. "Sorry I was absent-minded. I was up late reading." He smiled at me, that smile of tender recognition. I find myself thinking about how alive and absolutely luscious he looked, with those soft dark eyes and that look of concern, and then that lovely smile. Yes, I like sweet boys; I've quite developed a taste for that…

…well, yes, except I _also_ have a taste for wriggly blond creatures who remind me that I know how to do scary, kinky things to them. I don't think Draco understands just how _real_ that performance was…

… and I remember all too well how he flashed me the face of Bellatrix, when he was wearing his cousin's changeable shape. Oh, I am so glad that I Vanished those hairs… though not before he showed me, as if in a mirror, that in his eyes I am a face of Power, along with his terrifying and glamorous aunt.

(Yes, Draco had a crush on Voldemort's torturer-in-chief, and I'm not sure if I'm more disturbed because of the kinship tie or her title, but surely he wasn't a witness to most of her atrocities. To judge from the Pensieve depositions, he had little taste for it by the end, to her immense disgust.)

Neville took both of my hands in his, and kissed them, and whispered to me, "Take care of yourself, will you? And good luck tonight." He knows what we're about. "I'll see you tomorrow morning, then." Still holding my hands, he leaned in and kissed me on the forehead.

I stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek, but I missed, and instead my mouth met his jawline and neck … and I felt rather than saw his blush, as the skin heated under my lips. He wouldn't have done that two weeks ago; I can feel that sweet gravitation, the same that he does. Something will happen soon; it's inevitable.

ooo

What the time-turner will not do is to spare me the tedium of waiting. I have read enough, supped full on horrors for a week during which the sun never rose, so the sight of print makes me faintly nauseous; and there is nothing else to do, except to dress and then to wait. My invitation is for five o'clock; Neville is gone, and I am standing in front of the mirror in my little room once more, and once more it compliments me on my resemblance to the Furies. I am wearing the same clothes in which I observed the Decommissioning of Malfoy Manor; it is not coincidence, I think. I feel _armored_ in the black tunic and black jeans, and wrapped round in my winter cloak, I might be a stagehand or a ninja, all in black and prepared for stealthy deeds.

But there's nothing to do, just yet, but watch the hands of the clock make their slow progress. The time-turner only turns back the flow of time; it lets us double back, but not skip forward. Just as well; we'd lose great chunks of life that way, all the parts that we think are tedious, that stand between us and the end of life.

Outside, the snow falls.

ooo

I am no longer subject to the curfew, so I went for a walk. The corridors are empty at this hour, except for the ghosts; Peeves appeared to be otherwise occupied in some other part of the castle, or he took no notice of me. The Grey Lady nodded to me, and the Friar; Nearly Headless Nick gave me a tip of the hat (and with it a disconcerting bob of the head… no, after seven years I'm still not used to ghosts).

Well, there's a ghost with whom I might have business. The one who was deputed to teach us history, and in so doing, put us to sleep.

The History of Magic classroom was still dimly lit by the fading light when I walked in.

Binns turned from the dusty board on which he'd been writing dates of Goblin rebellions. Yes, even in the absence of schoolchildren, he carried on his appointed rounds. I recognized the lecture as one he'd given in my fourth year.

"Professor Binns," I said.

He turned. "There are no classes at Hogwarts, Miss…" He squinted.

"Granger. Hermione Granger."

"Ah, Muggle-born. Yes." His gaze was disconcerting, for all I could see the wall behind him. "I remember you, yes. The one who stayed awake."

Well, that said something about his powers as a lecturer, if that's how I distinguished myself in his mind.

"Altogether too attentive, yes." He looked at me with deceptive mildness… deceptive, I knew, because I could feel the hairs rising on the back of my neck. I'd had the momentary foolish notion of asking him some of the questions that had been circulating in my mind, and as he looked at me, eyes hollow, I realized that it would be a very bad idea.

I was looking at one of the Ministry's gatekeepers.

"You kept awake, yes." Binns smiled, and it was not pleasant. "Constant vigilance, eh?" Yes, I supposed I was of the school of Alastor Moody, the real one, that is. Never lose track of what may be sneaking up in your peripheral vision.

He said, "I think you ought not to ask so many questions. Sleep is not a bad thing, you know."

I said, "There will be plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead."

And with that I left the room, having the sense that it would be a bad thing to tarry in that place, so close to the dark of the year.

ooo

At the appointed hour, I threw the handful of Floo powder in the hearth, gathered my cloak and my blue beaded bag, made sure of my wand, and stepped through.

The hearths whirled by in the darkness. I caught a glimpse of white marble, and two bored Aurors — was that Malfoy Manor? – and a cavernous kitchen, which might be Longbottom House and might be some other home of similar vintage. And then I stepped through the cold green flames, into the warm clamor of the Burrow.

ooo

**Author's note:** "The urge to destruction is also a creative urge." Michael Bakunin, from his essay on the opposition in Germany. The essay leading up to this memorable quote is very much of the school of Hegel, and therefore less-remembered than the coda.


	54. Chapter 54

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Hermione steps through the Floo into the familiar kitchen of the Burrow, as the green flames flare around her like an uncanny veil. As she crosses the hearthstone, she feels a pang of yearning too strong to be nostalgia. If only it were the uncomplicated Burrow of her second or third year, the place of refuge with her foster-family in the magical world… well, Harry's foster-family, and hers by adoption, _or by virtue of her tag-along status_, her present mind adds with some bitterness.

Of course, there's no time for this sort of adolescent maundering, as Percy takes her arm with friendly firmness, and draws her off, while Molly looks on. It's plain to her that Molly is far from greeting her as an honored guest, which only confirms her suspicion that it was someone else who invited her.

Percy is asking her something about the Ministry, and she realizes that she's being prompted for shop talk. Well, that would be all too easy to provide: there would be the flutter about the new surveillance databases that the Ministry is planning to bring on line, an initiative he is doing his bit to forestall. "The Pureblood scriveners won't do a thing out of principle," he says, "but for sheer self-interest… well, some of them are time-servers and some of them actually earn their salaries, but all of them recognize that this could make them redundant."

Hermione smiles. "You mean that you prompted them a bit."

"The Muggle precedents were persuasive," he says, and takes a considered sip of his Firewhiskey. Percy doesn't drink, well, except for that conference at the Three Broomsticks. He'd said that he wasn't partaking for the duration ("we have to be coherent to sort this mess")… so this is curious. She frowns, looking at the tumbler. He whispers, "Not to worry. It's safe." He adds, "But watch me at dinner, and don't touch anything I don't serve myself."

They're standing in a gloomy corner of the front room as Luna and Dean amuse baby Teddy, who's apparently begun to walk, if only unsteadily; he reaches for the cartoon dragons that Luna conjures, loses his balance, and sits down on the floor rather abruptly. He doesn't cry, because yet more wonders are produced for his amusement: friendly frisking centaurs and faintly smiling Thestrals that look as beneficent as such creatures ever can… Not for the first time, Hermione thinks that Luna's version of the world is rather different from anyone else's.

Percy's hand is on her elbow, as if he were rather urgently inviting her to dance.

"So do you have any idea?"

"It's not Andromeda Tonks, that much is for certain," he says. "Not Harry or Ron, or Dean or Luna. Obviously. But anyone else…" He looks into the depths of the glass, and at that moment, there's a brisk shout from George that he's coming through, and Percy is jostled; the drink spills on Hermione's jeans, and Percy flicks his wand to Vanish it.

He adds in a rather louder voice, as if George had not been there, "And so of course they don't want a thing to do with anything Muggle, but when I said the words 'redundant' and 'mass unemployment', well and a bit of leaving the right sort of thing lying about for them to read didn't hurt matters."

Hermione frowns. "So we have…"

Percy smirks. "The beginnings of an aristocratic Luddite revolt." He smiles. "Which certain parties remind me the southerners wouldn't remember too well, but it's more than remembered in the North."

Hermione says, "I'm not clear on this. They wouldn't have the faintest idea how to break it." She knows that, because as a good hacker, she built the thing to be hacker-proof, so far as she could …

"Ah yes, but there are sins of omission," Percy says. "There are letters that fail to go out, and disappearances, and _unaccountable delays_…"

"But the higher-ups were quite keen on it… the improved Trace, the whole lot… the _blood status_ paperwork." She feels a sudden cold spurt of fear. "They'll have us all if we're not careful." _But I'll be first in line, just like last time_.

Percy says, "Kingsley's found the ones who scotched the business with the Auror trainee offers."

"Oh, is that so? And what does he propose to do?"

"With them? Not clear. He can't very well sack them, I don't think. But there are other things… I suspect there might be a very unpleasant lateral transfer in their futures."

"Well, I suppose that's good news, but what about your scriveners' revolt?"

"Not mine. They understand self-preservation. It's not politics, any more." He smiles. "And I made it clear to them just how much faster Kingsley would have found them out if it had been a matter of filing their every bit of correspondence in your _database_."

She glances across the room; Harry is staring at her with a pale face and a stricken expression, what would look sullen and resentful if it were anyone else. Ginny is staring at her as well, with much-too-bright eyes, and knocking back a teacup that she'd wager doesn't have a drop of tea in it… or not tea exclusively. Her expression is belligerent, that blazing look she remembers all too well from the birthday party. Not a good sign, no.

She says to Percy, "So … what's the plan? Is there one?"

Percy drops his voice and says, _"Not here."_

The Floo flares in the kitchen; it's Lavender arriving. Xeno Lovegood stands up from his colloquy with Andromeda Tonks, and offers her his arm with old-fashioned courtesy. Lavender smiles that brave crooked smile, and then beams as she sees Hermione, and says, "So where's his red-headed majesty?" Percy smirks and bows, and Hermione assists Lavender into the chair in the front room, as she laughs and says, "No, I meant, _is Ron about?"_

Harry turns and runs up the stairs, followed by Ginny. Lavender watches them with an oddly canny expression; she flicks her wand discreetly and mutters something that sounds rather like _Muffliato_, and only then smiles. "No Extendable Ears, then. So Harry's told me they've got Grimmauld Place ready, and Ron and I will be doing night watch." She frowns briefly. "That is, if Harry's really going to do it this time."

Percy's smile shows all the lines in his face. "He's not going to have a choice. He knows what we're bringing into play, and there's one chance." He looks significantly at Hermione.

Ron comes bounding down the stairs, his face alight when he sees Lavender, and for a brief moment Hermione feels a pang of regret. She'd forgotten how absolutely gorgeous he is, with his fair skin slightly flushed and his eyes bright. He falters when he meets her eyes…

… and she steels herself to break the awkward silence, except the lump in her throat won't quite let her. It's not fair, it's Christmas, the first Christmas of the peace… and then the sensible voice that's imitated from her mother says, "Oh honestly, Ron. It's perfectly all right. I've known for the last two weeks. Congratulations, the both of you. And merry Christmas."

Ron says, "Would you like something to eat?"

Lavender laughs, and Hermione feels herself relax as Ron does as well. "Pregnant women don't eat _all_ the time, though I do appreciate the offer. I can wait until dinner."

Hermione says, "I'm making tea. Anyone care for some?" It's clear that Percy isn't offering her a Firewhiskey, and she feels the need of something to keep her hands busy just now. Ron nods, as does Andromeda. Luna's apparently wanting tea as well, since cups and saucers are now swooping and diving through the dance of cartoon dragons and centaurs and Thestrals.

Hermione goes into the kitchen, and Percy follows her like a bodyguard. Good thing that, she thinks, because there is Molly marshalling the last of the feast. Percy sets the kettle to whistling, and Hermione Summons the cups and saucers. Molly Weasley's filing system for kitchen things is apparently engraved on her nervous system.

They sit companionably in the front room in a straggling half-circle, but there's no more conspiratorial conversation, because Andromeda Tonks is sitting there with Teddy on her lap. Harry and Ginny are still upstairs, which makes Hermione regret the opportunity. She still doesn't know the plan, only that it apparently requires a time-turner. She has to restrain herself from touching the place where the tiny hourglass hangs on its gossamer chain under the loose black tunic. She was reluctant to relinquish her cloak when she arrived, and she's keeping it over her shoulders, and hunching a little… Percy looks at her significantly, and she says, "I'm feeling chilled."

He says, "Then have more tea, by all means." And she'd swear he adds, silently, _and stop thinking about the time-turner, or you'll have everybody in the room staring at your chest._

She really isn't good at this conspiracy and skulking-about business, after however much practice.

Fortunately she's upstaged by Teddy Lupin, who has decided that he wants _more_ of the cartoon creatures, not less (for Luna's last efforts are gently fading into transparency, as she sips her tea with her wand tucked behind her ear). Nor do Luna's reassurances that there will be creatures _later_ reassure him, because of course he's not of an age to understand the notion of _later_. He wriggles, and fusses, and finally bursts into tears, in spite of his grandmother's attempts to soothe him.

At long last, Andromeda gathers up the little one and carries him upstairs. A moment later, the Floo flares once more, and Bill and Fleur step through; Hermione intercepts the look of distaste that flashes across Molly's face before she puts on her mask of holiday hostess. Fleur proffers a bottle of elf-made wine, which Molly receives with a pantomime of delight. While the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are exchanging ritual pleasantries in the kitchen, Bill takes both their cloaks and then comes into the front room. He greets Ron with a handshake, and claps Percy on the back. "So, this is it, eh?"

Percy nods. "Andromeda's upstairs. Best to keep her out of it."

Bill nods. "It's awkward enough for her, I would imagine. No point in giving anyone suspicions that she was conspiring with us."

"Augusta said that she'd give her asylum at Longbottom House if it came to it." Percy's eyes flick toward the staircase, and he adds, as if it weren't a complete non sequitur, "So there's the usual holiday fuss at the Ministry. A New Year's ball, as if they were hosting the Triwizard and they'd personally defeated Tom Riddle… oh and they were expecting the second coming of Merlin into the bargain, and wanted to put best foot forward for the occasion."

Ah yes, because Andromeda Tonks is descending the stairs, with a look of weary relief. At the very same moment, Molly Weasley announces that dinner is served, and invites them to gather about the long table.

There's a friendly milling-about as the seating arrangements sort themselves, and for a moment it's the warm place she remembers—until George's voice cuts through the tumult, "I need to have the good ear facing the _funny_ side of the family." Hermione wonders everyone else doesn't hear the hostility in it, though Percy certainly does, sitting as he is on the side of George's ruined ear. He stands up and walks around the other side of the table to sit at Hermione's left side. He leans in and says in a low voice, "I'll watch my mother. You keep an eye on George." She doesn't need to remember what else he said earlier, not to partake of anything he doesn't indicate is safe.

ooo

Hermione talks politics with Percy and watches George and feels the tension as everyone pretends it's just an ordinary Christmas. Arthur had proposed a toast to the first Christmas of the peace, "and may it be peace in earnest," but nobody really believes that, do they? Certainly not the author of the werewolf report, nor his son the high commissioner of refugees, nor herself, the foreign spy in the castle, nor Ron nor Harry the trainee Aurors, nor for that matter anyone at this table. She keeps catching Luna casting anxious glances at her father as if he might disappear at any moment… poor Xeno, who was interned in Azkaban in the late confusion about the Death Eater sympathizers… well, if that had been confusion and not revenge. No, she won't think about that at dinner, not when she's supposed to be keeping an eye on George, who's talking to Xeno about the shop, and sounding cheerful. It takes her a moment to realize what's strange about his single voice: he still leaves pauses, where his twin would have chimed in.

No. That's another lump in the throat. Too many people missing, and in the face of that last darkness it becomes a little less material whether she liked them or not.

Though she'd like to resurrect Severus Snape and ask him, rather strenuously, just what he thought he was about with _Sectumsempra_, which perversely continues to be the score-settling spell of choice in the post-war. Vengeance has a life of its own, long after the original author has been resting… in a sort of peace, she would suppose, these six months and more.

Yes. Six months in the world's timeline, it's been, since she watched Professor Snape bleed to death…

All the people at this table have been living in the short timeline. She's just been reading for a week, during which the sun never rose. The flickering candlelight and magical lamplight cheer her, like the colors of things after her visit to Azkaban. Yes, she's been in the figurative if not literal presence of the Dementors this last week, the week of Christmas Eve seven times over, and the solution is clear… She watches as Arthur Weasley smiles at Lavender's witticisms about her wooden leg (her knee doesn't straighten properly, even after months of rehabilitation appointments) and Ron pours her another glass of pumpkin juice.

She savors the elf-made wine, which isn't a delicacy that one drinks in one go, even in honor of a Christmas toast. The bouquet reminds her of incense, and then flowers, and then in another moment, the scent of oranges (the groves of paradise)… what a curious vintage. She remembers as a child wondering about the taste of ambrosia, and she thinks this might approximate it. Percy inhales its fragrance with his eyes closed in inquisitive bliss, the way a wine-taster might… or a Potions Master, doing the _test by nose_ that precedes a full assay.

Dean and Luna are talking about painting, and the extraordinary portrait of Gabriel Thomas that is now in the possession of his widow, Dean's mother. Derwent must have provided him with that excerpt (she hopes it was an excerpt) from the Pensieve depositions of Rodolphus Lestrange… who lies in Azkaban Prison, a dead husk… nonetheless kept alive. For what purpose? Derwent told her the _standard operating procedure_, which is not being followed in this case…

No. Christmas dinner is neither the time nor the place to meditate on being and nothingness, and in any case she's been charged with watching cheerful George Weasley, who's doing a bit of sleight of hand with bright folded foil, to the childlike delight of Xeno Lovegood. She imagines George might have been a quite creditable stage-magician of the Muggle variety; there was no wand deployed in that little performance, at least that she could see.

Luna says that the portrait of Dean's father is quite dashing, very much in the style of Sargent, though of course a proper wizarding portrait.

Hermione leans across to Dean, and asks if he's heard about the Sargent portrait at Longbottom House. "Portrait of Miss Emily Chattox. _Not_ in the catalogue raisonné."

Dean's face lights; if she were an artist she would question the curious paradox whereby his dark complexion radiates sunshine… so that he's always put her in mind of a sunflower. "No, I haven't heard of it," he says. He looks at Luna, "Now you aren't going to claim that Sargent was a wizard."

"Oh no," says Luna, "but he was an extraordinarily clever Muggle."

"So there's a story, isn't there?" Dean says.

Hermione says, "They had to Obliviate him. The daughter of the house was fooling about with Felix Felicis."

Dean smirks and rolls his eyes. "So they Obliviated him, but did they _pay_ him?"

"It was Sophonisba Chattox who commissioned it, so my guess would be yes," says Andromeda Tonks, and then adds with the faintest touch of stringency, "She had a name for probity in money matters." _As one would expect from Augusta Longbottom's mother_, Hermione thinks. _Although I'm not sure what she would think of her great-grandson recommending that I rob banks in preference to memory charms _... It's in the nature of the holiday, she supposes, to bring the whole year crashing in on one … and then she looks up the table at Harry, sitting at Molly's right hand and cheerfully exchanging jibes with Ron, at the opposite end of the table, about the Chudley Canons and how they're only doing so well because everyone else in the Quidditch world is thoroughly demoralized at the World Cup ban. As their eyes meet, his good cheer dies into play-acting. There are things afoot here, and Harry has never been much of an actor.

Percy at her left says something in a low voice about the improved Trace, and asks her what she knows about the Muggle methods; he's only recently caught up on the sort of thing they do with CCTV. "It's a sort of Muggle camera, isn't it?"

"Well, yes," she explains, "but it captures moving images."

"Then it's like a wizarding camera."

"Yes, I suppose, but it works on completely different principles. For one, the images aren't sentient. Which isn't to say that they don't tell very interesting stories sometimes."

Percy frowns. "But how does it _move_, then?"

"It's a succession of still pictures," she says, "only they flash one after another, to fool the eye." Across the table from her, George is making something curious with his napkin, some sort of talking animal, which would be more appropriate if little Teddy were at table, though it's only Xeno, with his flowing locks and mild glance, to appreciate George's efforts.

Percy's face lights in comprehension—he's actually quite fanciable in the moment of _understanding _- but really, she oughtn't to be thinking such thoughts about Percy, because it feels as if she's thinking them about Ron by proxy, and Ron belongs to Lavender, and Percy himself to his Dark Lady, no not Dark in the Dark Lord sense, but the Lady of the Sonnets, that is if Percy wrote sonnets, which he might, given just how smitten he seems to be with his unknown inamorata …

"So are your Luddites doing anything about the improved Trace?" Technology transfer is a funny thing, she thinks; in this case, the notion of technological revolt has leapt across nearly two centuries, from desperate Muggle weavers to Pureblood witches and wizards.

Percy shakes his head. "No, but Penelope and her lot have put rather a damper on it, by insisting it apply to Purebloods and Muggle-borns alike. No more exceptions for 'traditional cultural expression.'" Hermione frowns. "Dueling lessons and broom-flying practice." His smile is rather shark-like as he adds, "They might give up on that in any case, because they're far too busy since the Decommissioning. Muggle Liaison is having a headache…"

"Ah, Malfoy Manor is no longer Unplottable." Percy nods.

There's one of those odd silences when everyone at the table takes a breath at once, and then Dean says, "Do you think that Neville's Gran would be receptive to a request to view that portrait?"

"I don't see any reason why not," Hermione says. "I'll ask her when I'm at Longbottom House tomorrow. I think you'll like it. It's actually a _wizarding_ portrait. Very talkative. I guarantee you will learn some things about Quidditch." _And notable Pureblood lines_, she's tempted to add but doesn't.

Lavender giggles, and Hermione feels her face heating as she smiles involuntarily. Yes, she has an invitation to Neville's house for Boxing Day, though … and then suddenly she realizes that she hasn't bought him a present. For his birthday, yes, but not for Christmas. Not for anyone, actually. She's been quite remiss and it's far too late. No, she had spent Christmas Eve reading about soul-sucking demons … well she supposes that Banishing them would be a gift, though nowhere near as personal a gesture as she ought to have made, and now that lovely book at midsummer looks like caprice. She hadn't been in love with him then, no, only flirting, feeling her oats in those clothes that seemed to have some of Tonks' personal magic in them yet. Though if her guess were right, Tonks wouldn't have flirted with a boy at all. No, not at all, except… "It wasn't ordinary times at all," she'd overheard Andromeda saying in the garden at midsummer. "If it had been ordinary times, I would have thought someone had dosed her with Amortentia."

George is doing something deft and clever, left-handed too, with the talking-animal puppet he's fashioned from the napkin… Hermione suppresses her irritation, as Arthur rises to suggest celebratory Firewhiskey. There are two bottles standing on the sideboard, across the table from her; one as yet unsealed and the other, from which Ginny has been discreetly replenishing her tumbler. Arthur unseals the bottle and fills tumblers for Bill, Xeno, Harry and Ron. Molly reminds him that they ought to finish the last of the other one; she refills her daughter's glass (Hermione flinches in disapproval—hasn't there been enough harm already from Ginny's drinking, without encouraging it?) and then Summons the glasses next to Hermione and Percy, to pour a finger or two in. Percy's face is carefully neutral, but he puts a staying hand on her wrist (just like Neville in the pub, telling her she's had one too many. Too late to do anything about _that_, but she really ought to mind Percy.)

Molly sends the dishes into the kitchen in orderly procession to wash themselves, and everyone stands up to continue the conviviality in the front room, Firewhiskey in hand. She absently lifts her tumbler to her lips, and then remembers, as Percy darts her a look and a brief shake of the head. Harry is standing next to her. "Could I have a word with you in the back garden, if it's possible?" The tone is casual, but his face is pasty-white and drawn. She puts down the tumbler and says, mostly for the benefit of those about them, "If it's just a minute," pulls her cloak about her and fastens the clasp. Harry throws on his cloak, and leads the way through the kitchen to the back door. Harry is still holding his tumbler of Firewhiskey.

In the blue snowy gloom of the garden, Harry pours out the Firewhiskey and listens to it hiss on the icy crust before turning to her.

"Percy told me that you have the time-turner again." Before she can make up her mind about how she feels about that revelation, he adds, "Before we do what we have to do, I want to go to Godric's Hollow. Like last year."

"Hopefully without meeting any snakes," she says with a shudder.

He shakes his head. "I'll be careful this time." They laugh, even though it's far from funny.

She nods. "I didn't bring you any presents."

"I don't need anything, and we all know…" He stops himself before he says, _you don't have any money_. Griphook's bargain hasn't changed her situation with Gringott's. "This is what I really wanted for Christmas."

"Well, then," she says, and takes his arm for the Apparition.

ooo


	55. Chapter 55

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

They materialize inside the little gate to the graveyard, as Hermione knew that they would. Harry has taken them past the square, past the war memorial that turns into a statue of a happy family, into the graveyard itself.

She follows him past the more recent graves and then the deeply quiet ones from the 1890s, where the hapless remnant of the Headmaster's family is buried, and the ancient grave of Ignotus Peverell. They are weaving between snow-capped gravestones, lit only by the starry blue-white glow of _Lumos_, wordlessly, Harry ahead of her like a guide who knows the way. He must have traversed this path in dream many, many times, in dream or memory since they last were here a year ago, or he's visited it in waking life, though in their busy lives she's not sure when he might have found the time. She imagines this graveyard under summer leaf-light, or autumn drizzle. She's only ever visited it that once, wrapped round in snow…

She's standing there before she realizes it, snow drifting gently down around her, in big slow flakes, melting into mist against the barrier of her warming charm and Impervius. Not so Harry; it's collecting like disordered miniature lace in his thick black hair; he's standing with shoulders hunched, looking down at the flat stones set into the ground.

_Born 27 March 1960. Born 30 January 1960_. His mother was three months older than his father.

He sweeps the snow away, with a flick of the wand, raising eddies of loose dry snow that sparkle faintly in the wand-light. More snow filters down through the dark air; she watches it settle in his hair and on his glasses, and wonders at why he doesn't warm it away. All around them stretches the dimly lit village of the dead, headstones capped in snow, low branches loaded with it. No church full of carolers; no strollers on the village square. Christmas night in a graveyard is a very quiet time, she thinks.

At length he says, "So we're going to do it, then?" As if he hadn't summoned her.

She says, "I thought Percy talked to you."

He makes a face, a face altogether too familiar, the face he used to make when she'd just reminded him of an assignment pending… but of course he has other things to do. Percy, no doubt, is in the same class as she: one of the people who reminds him of things he'd rather not think about.

He confirms that, "Yes, Percy. He did. But… it's Christmas."

"No better time than when they don't expect. And she's had three drinks already, and you know what that does to her." Certainly, she knows the more Firewhiskey in the equation, the less predictable the results.

"And you're in this… why?"

"Because you asked. Because Percy asked."

"And which weighs more?"

She narrows her eyes at him. "Don't ask that. They both weigh, for different reasons." She says, "Ginny has ample reason for resentment and that's before the war. No one took her to a healer after that business with the Chamber of Secrets—not that I heard of, anyway. She got a lecture about what she oughtn't to have done, that she was stupid to have written in the diary if she didn't know where it kept its brain. But then, easy enough to lay blame when no one had been paying attention. Percy was the only one who noticed anything amiss, wasn't he?" Harry continued to look at the graves. "None of you really think about what's happened, do you? So she's reckoned lucky to have you, and meanwhile you're about pretending it's all normal in the postwar." She can feel her own rage boiling up, and tries to keep her voice level. "We've had no choice, for a long time, but to act as if it's all about you. But you've done your part. The war is over. Now we have to look to the other casualties. Yes, I know you want a normal life, you've never had one…"

He says, again, "It's Christmas."

"So it is." She's feeling angry now. "Does it occur to you what's going on, at all? You've been bought off, and if Kingsley had gotten his way, it would have been the lot of us. We'd all be in the Auror corps, at the beck and call of the Ministry, rather than asking questions about what's going on in the post-war. Mr. Weasley's toast notwithstanding, this is _not_ peace. Not remotely."

He nods. "I know. Ginny's suspended from duty… while they investigate. Everybody knows what they're investigating." He pauses, pained. "Death squads. Kingsley doesn't like it because it's looking bad for the Order."

"You don't think anybody in the Order …"

"No. It's people settling scores and letting the blame fall on the Order." He shuffles his feet and pushes his hands deeper into his pockets; she recognizes the gesture, even muffled by the cloak. "Ginny was talking to McConnell, and they've got McConnell on suspension…"

Well, at least someone listened to her.

That's the least of it, of course. And if she thinks about it, Ginny's not important enough, just another teenaged casualty, and no one bothered particularly about what had been done to her when she was eleven, because after all children are resilient, and she was only the girl at the tail of a parade of boys. Molly's mother-hen clucking didn't seem to extend to more than protecting her the way that girls ever had been protected, so-called: to forbid them the larger world. She certainly understands Ginny's desire to fight in the battle, underaged or no.

Would Ginny, not poisoned by Amortentia and Firewhiskey both, be as vengeful as she is now?

Harry doesn't want to hear this, it's plain. He's the hero of the piece, and he doesn't want to ruin his peacetime …

"If you really cared about Ginny, you'd do something about this. Look, the brother that everybody disowned is doing more for her than you are." What she doesn't add: and he has nothing to show for it, does he? Not the respect of his family, certainly, and Penny (she shudders) who wants nothing to do with Purebloods because of what happened to her in the war, and … he's doing it only out of regard for his own conscience, to make up for what he did wrong by mistake. The mistake: well, to be rule-abiding and ambitious, and the unfortunate butt of the twins' jeers… because when the wrong sort are ambitious, they need to be brought low.

She's not going to think about that.

Harry is staring down at the graves, as if he's turned to a statue himself; he's got on that stubborn look, which gives her no hope of this taking a reasonable turn.

Finally he says, "I thought it was going to be the three of us… forever. And then things came apart."

"I was never anything but useful," she says. "That's why I accepted the invitation. I can be of use. But it's the last time, and I'm really not happy that you haven't made up your mind to do this, that you don't have a plan… it's not a Potions essay, Harry, it's Ginny's life and maybe someone else's if we don't get this right." She sighs, and pulls her cloak about her. There's so much more she could say: _I hate doing things by halves, and I could be home reading about how to banish Dementors, … _

It isn't any good thinking about this.

The snow sifts down, sparkling in the faint wandlight, and she realizes just how unreal it feels, inside the shelter of the warming charm. Well, much has felt unreal this last year or two, hasn't it?

Harry says, uneasily, that it feels odd, but he still wants to visit this grave. Even though there are very many more war dead now, still…

They don't need to name them: there's Alastor Moody and Remus Lupin and Tonks and her father Ted and Colin Creevey, the ones she can name right away, and then there are the names read at the memorial service after the battle, and the ones _not_ read, which is to say everyone killed in the year before.

And then there are the casualties of the post-war.

Yes, but that doesn't make the old dead any less important.

Neither of them says it, but Harry will probably keep vigil here every Christmas Eve for the rest of his life.

He says, "The last six months have been horrible." He goes on to talk about the first shock, the killings in Hogsmeade, to which he was very nearly a witness—near enough to have been considered, briefly, as a suspect.

The worst thing about them: hard to name. There was the waste of Goyle dying, after they'd been to trouble to save him, and Blaise, whom he has to say he really never knew, just one more face at the Slytherin table until Ginny told him that Blaise had a _reputation_, was the Slytherin fast crowd all in one skin, sleeping with boys and girls alike; he'd even said something in Ginny's hearing about how she was fanciable but unfortunately a blood traitor. And then there was Pansy, whom he thought he hated … until he heard her crying at the end. She'd had a falling-out with Draco, or been snubbing him over some quarrel, before they left for Hogsmeade, that much he'd pieced together, and she wanted him to know they weren't quits.

At the end, she'd been asking for her mother. Pansy's mother was in Azkaban. Then. Well, now she was on house arrest and charges had been quietly dropped. As Hermione no doubt knew.

Hermione stands quiet, watching the snow settle into the carved letters that sum up Harry's parents: they were born, and they died.

And then, Harry says, everything else seemed to fall apart in rapid succession: her and Ron, and Molly and Ginny, just when everything was supposed to be happy, because they'd fought the war, hadn't they, and won.

"The war isn't over," Hermione says. "Not from my point of view."

"Are you staying?" he asks. Not the question she expected.

"I don't know. It's gotten … complicated."

"I miss you," he says.

"You signed off on that Howler."

"I didn't know what you were about. It didn't seem to make sense that you were … with Malfoy."

She shrugs. "You're right. It doesn't make sense. Very little in the postwar does make sense." She says, "I think he's finally figured out what he'd signed on for. It wasn't pretty. And in any case, he owes us his life, so we've _all_ to do with Malfoy."

Harry shakes his head and stares at the ground, then at the middle distance. "I couldn't just leave him to die."

She nods.

"And Ron wouldn't have, either. I know he said some things… when you were fighting." (No doubt that could be heard several rooms away, she thought.) "The two of you brought out the worst in each other."

She has to admit that's true. They've gotten on much better, she and Ron, as colleagues than as boyfriend and girlfriend. That attraction, that felt so urgent, had been an irritant, _an itch_, as people said, but nothing pleasant—more like scratchy old-fashioned woolen underwear. She'd cast it in rather different terms at the time, but when she counts up the things she did under its influence…

He says, "The birthday party, well, no he didn't behave well, and you know Ron has never been good about apologizing. And he was drinking." He adds, "It doesn't excuse what he said to you. But it's been six months, Hermione …"

"It's been two years, more like," she says. "You know about the time-turner. It's been two years. Two jobs, more than full time, and … reading." Even now, the chill of the seven days with no sunrise is upon her. "It's been two years." What's hardest to say, "Ron is happier with Lavender. She makes him laugh. He's a better person with her. Now we have to talk about this."

Harry shifts, uneasily. "There's no time."

"I have a time-turner. We have all the time in the world." She adds, "But I don't know for how much longer, so this might be our last chance." She takes a deep breath. "I liked Ginny before. She was lonely, like me, only in a different way. It didn't occur to me before I met her that you could have six brothers and still be lonely. But then I was only ever lonely at school. At home … "

"I'm sorry about your parents," he says.

She takes a firm grip on herself, and keeps her voice level. "They're not dead. Only … somewhere else." She wants to add, _and not like Neville's parents, either_, but of course she doesn't know that, or doesn't feel safe assuming it.

Harry looks at her, steadily now: not a word, and then his glance moves from her face to the cold stones set into the snowy ground, and she thinks: his parents, whom he's never met, lie under their feet. The dead, they're surrounded by the dead, bones or whatever is left of them after nearly two decades in the ground, and the older burials here go back centuries … She remembers fourteenth-century sarcophagi, with the dead laid out, no longer idealized, too much death in those days… why she's free-associating to the Black Death, she doesn't know, but there's been too much death, too much altogether, century on century, for all it's inevitable _in the long run_.

Harry's parents aren't six centuries away; they ought to be living, might be living… had it not been for the First War. Her eyes travel to the scar on his forehead, that he assures everyone is only a scar, _now. _She's seen the depositions, yes, and has lived through some of those episodes of possession, oh gods she knows more than she wants to know about _everyone_.

At very great length, he says it again. "I'm sorry about your parents."

She swallows, trying to ignore the salt taste of tears. It's too soon for that. Harry's parents are dead, whereas hers… are only missing, and not even that. Only somewhere else.

She takes out her wand and conjures the wreath of white roses, just like last year.

Harry looks at her, face pale in the unnatural light from the wand-tip, and then she sees no more, because he's pulled her into a rough hug, bone against bone as if they had no flesh at all, a harsh mortal embrace that will bruise her, she's quite sure. Harry's sorrow has always had an element of fury in it, whether anger at himself for feeling it or for the hopelessness of mourning what was gone forever before he was even conscious of having had it.

His breath against her ear is hot and dry as a desert wind. "I'm sorry, Hermione, I'm so sorry."

She has her arms around him, and she's patting his hair, not her own gesture, she realizes. Neville. Who learned it, so he told her, from Percy Weasley, and Percy… by way of Molly. She doesn't know how to do this… no, but she has to do this, just as she has to do the thousand other things that will not be done otherwise.

Neville's voice, "We know fuck-all about what we're doing." (But they do it anyway. And they attend the hopeless cases in hospital, too, week after week, year after year. That's where Neville was this afternoon, as Harry is here at graveside tonight.)

There's nothing to be said. The usual words of comfort, "It's all right," would be a lie.

At last he disengages, and wipes his eyes, without displacing the glasses. Percy would cover his eyes with his hands and push up his glasses. Neville would cover his face, and would only weep audibly if the tears were angry…

She knows too much about everyone. She knows how Harry and Neville and Percy weep… and terrified Draco, in the middle of the night, and Madam Rosmerta in shame and horror (sitting in a booth in her own pub), and Dean's mother, in mourning and relief both, when she learned her husband's fate eighteen years after the fact.

She remembers Neville at the memorial service… he didn't cover his face at all, but let the tears run down his cheeks as if he were stone standing in the rain. Even stone gods can weep.

The snow is falling thickly; already the carved names are losing their sharp edges, as the soft glittering stuff fills them in. It nestles, softly, in the carven whorls of the Christmas roses, and the dark stuff of Harry's cloak, the criss-crossed layers of his hair, and she realizes how far she's changed that she doesn't try to set any of that in order. The snow will fall, and cover everything.

He says, "There's another grave to visit," and takes her arm.

They emerge from the dreadful compression of Apparition into the snowy garden of Shell Cottage, and it's only then that she begins to weep. Nonetheless she and Harry sweep away the snow from the simple headstone that reads, _Here lies Dobby, a free elf_, and she says, "Ron ought to be here," even as Harry conjures the memorial wreath.

Next year, they resolve, if they should live so long, it will be the three of them standing together in the falling snow.

ooo

It isn't until she's looped the time-turner over both of their necks (she pushes away the recollection of the similar embrace with Draco, in the foyer of her parents' house), and Apparated back to the garden of the Burrow, that Harry speaks again.

"Thank you," he says. "I really don't want to do this, but it helps that you're with us if we need it."

_If_ is not the word he ought to be saying just now.

"I don't know how much longer I'm going to have the time-turner. There are altogether too many people in on the secret." Percy, and Harry, and McGonaagall of course, and probably Derwent, and heaven help us Draco, though he's bound as yet by Fidelius, and then whomever else Percy has told, which probably includes Ron and Lavender as well, and in any case Ron may well have suspected… No, a secret that widely kept is no secret at all.

Harry looks around the garden of the Burrow, innocent and still under its cloak of snow, and says, "I really love this place."

Hermione sighs. "I know."

"But if this is what we're going to have to do to make Ginny safe, then … "

"Then we'll do it." She says, "So there's a plan, isn't there?"

"Well… we've moved some things to Grimmauld Place. Not too much, because we have to be discreet."

She says, "Well, that's not too hard to do. When did everyone go downstairs?"

"About an hour before you arrived."

"Well, there's no difficulty _there_." She thinks of the blue beaded bag and the time-turner. "So… what were you thinking of doing?"

"Taking her to St. Mungo's."

"Well, she's got a wand, and a rather different idea of where she's to be tonight."

"She's been drinking, so her reactions won't be as quick as ours. She's about three glasses in by now. I think you and I can take her, though we'll need a distraction."

Hermione resists the urge to roll her eyes. Ginny the trainee Auror will not be an easy target, even with three glasses of Firewhiskey in her.

"Oh, Harry."

"Don't worry," he says, patting her arm, "we'll think of something."

_Dear god, I hope so_, she thinks. The exasperation feels familiar, and comfortable. Leave it to Harry to procrastinate, and fail to do his homework, though she can see that Ron has been on the job, Ron and Lavender, who she must admit are a formidable team. Unfortunately, she knows from experience that improvisation under pressure is not her own strong suit.

Well, nothing for it but to do the part that she can do. She steps away from Harry, turns the hour-glass back the requisite number of turns, and then braces to Apparate into the upstairs hallway outside Harry's room.

The cheery sound of voices drifts up from downstairs, as she moves through the rooms, carefully packing everyone's things: Dean and Luna, Ron and Percy. It's like the last time, only stealthier; once or twice, she has to duck into the shadows as someone comes upstairs on one errand or another. No, Harry hadn't planned this out _at all_, though she will have to hold her tongue because Percy gave her to understand that it had been something of a feat to convince him at all.

ooo

Then there's the stop at Twelve Grimmauld Place, and she isn't sure which of the rooms belongs to whom, so she leaves the things in the kitchen. Oh yes, and when she gets back, she'll have to apply warming and drying charms to Harry's hair and cloak, because aside from the risk of hypothermia it won't do for him to come back into the kitchen of the Burrow drenched to the skin.

Grimmauld Place is rich in empty rooms, where she can calibrate time-turner against wall-clock before she Apparates once more back to the back garden of the Burrow…

… she'd be dizzy from all of the time-turning and Apparating, if this weren't her daily routine, though she does notice that Harry's Apparition form is rather better than hers, and for the first time regrets her own lack of Auror training. They really _don't_ teach the good stuff at Hogwarts.

She's still thinking about that as they approach the back steps, and she realizes that Harry is covered in rather an implausible amount of snow; heaven forbid anyone should notice. And worse, he's leading the way. Fortunately, there's no one in the kitchen but Andromeda Tonks, and so she assumes what she imagines is her "know-it-all" expression and brazens it out.

"Impervius, Harry. I thought Aurors at least remembered weather-repelling charms."

Harry makes a rude gesture at her, and in sheer relief she laughs.

"Honestly, Harry," she says, Vanishing the snow in his hair and applying a drying charm, "you get out of Hogwarts and you run wild."

There's her tumbler on the sideboard, though Merlin only knows who may have put what in it in her absence; nonetheless, she picks it up, and makes to head back to the front room.

Percy intercepts her, and she notices Molly behind him, looking at them very briefly though incuriously, before turning once more to Xenophilius Lovegood.

Percy is clearly taking no chances; he collides with her, hard enough to spill the drink._ No, Percy, I'm not a complete idiot, _she thinks with some irritation. He takes her arm and they go out the back door to sit on the back steps, where he indicates that she should sit, and firmly closes the door behind them.

He intends a lengthy chat, it would appear. She conjures bluebell flames.

ooo

The next thing that he does is to take her tumbler and empty it out at the foot of the Flutterby bushes. "I don't want you taking a sip of that by accident," he says as he hands the glass back to her. Then he pours out his own, or most of it, sniffs it and nods judiciously, then sets it at his foot.

"So, how far is he with us?"

"I don't know." At that, Percy sighs heavily. "No," she adds. "I've moved all of our things to Grimmauld Place. There's no going back. We'll just have to convince him, because this is the last chance." She counts out on her fingers, "You know about it, and McGonagall of course, because she's supervising me, and Ron, and Harry, and probably Lavender." Percy nods. "And there are probably plenty who guess, and it's not as if it isn't an open secret what I did my third year… if anybody compares notes."

Percy says, "He's backed out three times."

"Well, call the fourth time a charm, then. So I gather there's not really a plan?"

"No, Harry was to have been Plan A—try to convince her—and the rest of us are Plan B… exercise of force."

"Well, now he's talking about Plan B exclusively. 'The two of us can probably take her,' he says." She casts a warming charm, and says, "Lovely night for a chat on the back steps. If it were summer, we'd be serenaded by the chickens."

"She's been drinking," Percy says gloomily.

"Harry estimated she was on glass number three. I still don't fancy trying to take her on. She was a fairish duelist six months ago and she's been practicing since."

Percy takes off his glasses, slowly and deliberately, reaches inside his robes to put them in the breast pocket of some inner layer, and then as deliberately covers his face with his hands. Hermione isn't sure what to do.

"I don't know," he says. "I failed her once, badly. And the second chance isn't working out too well, and someone in this house is poisoning her. Dosing her, all right, but at toxic levels."

She says, "Do you know who it is?"

"Either mum or George, the suspects we were watching in there. Motives are very thin on the ground, but I know George isn't thinking straight—if he ever did—and mum's been at odds with Ginny since summer." His voice is very, very calm, and it's only the slight tremor in his shoulders that tells her something is wrong.

"And your father?"

"No motive that I can see. Dean and Luna are in the clear, Ron and Lavender too… they've no reason to be tampering with her." He says, "It was Lavender who raised the alarm this last time, actually. Outside eyes help, you know. And Ginny threatened her."

"Oh, Percy." She puts a tentative hand on his shoulder, and he looks up; in the light from the bluebell flames his face is gleaming with tear-tracks. He wipes his eyes, and puts the glasses back on. "We'll think of something," she says (realizing she sounds altogether too much like Harry). "It's a shame we don't have adult backup…"

"Oh, but we do," Percy says, and then starts to cry and laugh at the same time. "We do, so we do." He pulls her into a close embrace, and whispers in her ear, "Augusta. She knows."

"Augusta who?" Because surely he can't be on given names with Neville's Gran.

"What other Augusta do you know?"

This strikes Hermione as surpassingly odd, given how buttoned-up and proper Percy usually is. "And how does she know?"

"How else? I told her." He kisses her on the cheek, though not with the same intent as the last time. "I'm working up courage to tell her something else as well." And then the shaking in his shoulders and chest is definitely laughter, and she's seriously puzzled, unless he's simply gone mad.

"I don't understand."

"Oh dear, if all works out … well, better than I dare hope … we could be in-laws. Of a sort."

Now she really doesn't understand, and thinks it better to remain silent and have the matter explained.

"You said I should save it for her. Which was good advice, really. The two of us, you and I … well, in theory, and more than one party has recommended it, but it wouldn't be good. No. We would only encourage each other."

She nods. "I've thought the same."

"And in any case, Neville's completely smitten with you, and if I don't misread, you with him as well. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a declaration tomorrow. And, well, you can't miss that I've been spending rather a lot of time with Augusta. Originally, it was business, and now… well, between one thing and another, it's something different."

It's dawning on her, slowly, what he must mean, though it's quite a lot to wrap her brain around. "Neville's Gran. You fancy… oh dear."

"Well, if you put it _that_ way, it does sound odd. But really, she's not so old at all, and they're always telling me I'm _very_ old indeed, and so… we're of an age, I would say."

"She's 104, and you're … "

"Rather younger, I know, but really, it's not the same as on your side of the border. It's more like 25 and 50, and that's not unheard-of, is it?"

"But you couldn't have children." A ridiculously middle-class view of the matter, she realizes, as soon as the words are out of her mouth.

"There are plenty of war orphans to adopt, if she wanted children, and I have _no_ shortage of siblings stepping up to perpetuate the Weasley line, if it came to that."

She isn't sure what to say about all of it, and so she stares into the blue flames, which may or may not help things but in any case are keeping them all warm. Comfort in a glass jar, flickering gas-blue—the same color as the gas ring in her mother's kitchen, but that's the other world.

All around them the winter night, and overhead sullen overcast—in any case, no stars. Grimmauld Place is provisioned, she needn't worry about that—only about whether she's going to survive the next part. Her and Harry…

She stares at her hand, which is still holding the empty tumbler.

"You're liking that stuff altogether too well," Percy says. Punctilious, but warm. Yes, the two of them together would reinforce each other's worst tendencies.

Then the back door opens, and Andromeda Tonks says in a low voice, "Do you mind if I take your glass?"

Hermione frowns, shakes her head, and hands her tumbler up to Andromeda.

Andromeda sniffs it, eyes closed. The lines of her face relax into the expression of someone listening to a sad but beautiful song. Percy hands his tumbler up to her. "Take mine too. I think there might be enough left in it to do a decent assay. I don't know what it's going to do to the Flutterby bushes, but the roots got a good dousing."

Harry looks at her, and then at Percy.

Andromeda says, "You know, I think I'd like to have a look at the garden. It's quite lovely with the fresh snowfall, and Hermione's quite a dab hand at warming charms."

Odd time to be making small talk, Hermione thinks_._

Andromeda adds, "It's stuffy in here, and I'm feeling the need of a breath of fresh air." Then, quite unexpectedly, she's moving, Harry in tow, and Hermione scrambles to her feet, bumping into Percy, to avoid being pushed down the back steps. As it is, she trips over the last step, and Percy catches her.

"The garden, _now,_" Andromeda hisses, and she sounds _dangerous_.

Hermione recognizes it as impatience, and realizes in the same moment that an ally has arrived. Whatever Andromeda is about, it's serious business. They troop into the blue gloom beyond the reach of the cheery kitchen windows, Andromeda leading the way, her hand still gripping Harry's arm above the elbow, Percy and Hermione following in her wake. At the foot of the garden, Hermione casts a Disillusionment Charm on each of them. Andromeda casts _Lumos_.

Andromeda is still holding Percy's mostly-empty tumbler of Firewhiskey in her hand, and Hermione remembers that flutter of tenderness across the features that still keenly recall Bellatrix. "That's Amortentia, isn't it?" she says. Percy nods.

"So far as I could tell, but the nose is actually a reasonable check," he says.

Hermione binds the tumblers in a thick layer of webbing—the others goggle; plainly they don't know this spell either—and tucks them into her blue beaded bag. Odd that they have Draco to thank for that—well, that and the notes from Snape's Wolfsbane tutorial.

"So what's the first stop?" Hermione says, in her brisk sensible tone.

"St. Mungo's," Percy says. "Only it will be the devil's own time convincing _her_."

"I'd call Horace Slughorn if I were you," Andromeda says. "You're talking about involuntary commitment, aren't you? And without a Potion Master's word that this is actually Amortentia…"

Harry raises his wand to cast _Accio_; the back door swings open and a bottle comes hurtling out to land with a thump in Harry's outstretched hand.

"The bottle Ginny was serving herself from," he says. There's a bit sloshing about in the bottom. "And Mrs. Weasley poured from this one."

Harry's finally on the job, it would appear. It's not clear what Andromeda said to him inside, but it appears to have made a difference.

Andromeda says, "So you're sure."

Percy says, "I've been watching for some time, ever since we tried to talk to Ginny. All of it matches, every bit. I just didn't want to believe what I was seeing." He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, making it stand on end, then smooths it down again. He does it again—a nervous habit—and Hermione realizes that he's scared too, but not letting on.

Hermione says, "Well, then, we're decided. Who's going to distract her? I'll take her if need be."

"No," Andromeda says. "She'll be _expecting_ it from you. I'm in the background." Harry is still holding the bottle and staring at the darkly gleaming liquid in the bottom.

Hermione says, "All right, I'll distract her and you take her." She looks at Harry. "Are you in or not?"

Harry looks at her and momentarily narrows his eyes, and then sighs. "I'm in. I made rather a mess of it before." And then with an oddly childish, plaintive tone, "But it's _Christmas night_…"

Hermione reminds him that it will be high tide in St. Mungo's emergency receiving and he needn't worry about staff being on hand. Then she closes her eyes, to summon the happiest memory. Things are contingent, of course, for once more it's the missive from Hogwarts: confirmation of what she is, the truth of the matter, whether for good or ill. The Patronus takes shape, for all her doubts, and she dispatches it, with a message for Horace Slughorn, and for Boudicca Derwent, telling them that she will meet them at St. Mungo's Spell Damage very shortly, with a serious case.

Harry says, "I'll tell her we're going to _have a talk_, and you come along as well…"

Percy takes her arm and reassures her that he'll be watching…

Hermione says, _"S__omeone else_ will be watching. It might be prudent to give them a proper show." Percy frowns, and she feels a flare of irritation. She grabs his arm, roughly, and pulls him in close, so abruptly that he stumbles a little. "What are we supposed to have gulped to the dregs?" she says. "Honestly, Percy, for a wizard with twelve OWLs…" He gets it then, for he kisses her on the top of the head.

They decide the last details. It will have to be Apparition, for the Floo requires giving away one's destination. Harry will manage the side-along with Ginny from the garden and the rest can follow.

The back door creaks a little as they creep back into the empty kitchen. The voices in the front room are louder now; the second round of Firewhiskey is making itself felt. Hermione lifts the Disillusionment Charm, then links arms with Percy to stagger into the front room, arm in arm. She leans into him, as if she were thinking of the bedroom, except that it feels like an awkward sort of dance instead. It feels like bad acting, with Percy's nose grazing her scalp as he nuzzles into her hair. It's a good thing that their audience is mostly drunk—though not Molly, whose glance is clear-eyed as ever, but luckily it drifts past her.

Andromeda goes upstairs, _to get Teddy_, she whispers.

Harry says to Ginny, "Come talk to us in the garden."

Ginny turns, tumbler in hand and a blazing look on her face, in the midst of the anecdote about Druella Rosier Black, Abraxas Malfoy, a dose of Polyjuice and a turkey baster—for, the tale has it, not only is Narcissa her husband's half-sister, but she's of unnatural birth, having been conceived by means of Polyjuice and …

Unnoticed by Ginny, Andromeda comes downstairs with her winter cloak about her shoulders. Hermione thinks about the time-turner on its chain, and how there's yet another errand to be done on the way to St. Mungo's. Andromeda won't be returning tonight.

Ginny's eyes light on Hermione, who shudders, glad that someone else is going to be managing the difficult part. Percy lets Hermione disengage from his encircling arm as they push through the kitchen door and into the snowy garden.

"So what is this?" Ginny says in a hissing whisper. The drink's still in her hand; Percy's eyes are following it.

Hermione says in a voice that feels high and strained and false, "I hear that you told Harry what happened in the loo at the Three Broomsticks. Who's being jealous of whom?"

"You bitch," Ginny says, her teeth showing in an atavistic, wolfish grimace.

Harry continues, "So you said, 'Now I've had her too,' and I was just wondering…"

Ginny stares from one to the other, wand in one hand, drink in the other, hesitating. Before Hermione can even think _I hope Andromeda's as good a duelist as her sister,_ Ginny is falling, rigid in a body-bind, and the tumbler is hanging in midair, the surface of the Firewhisky still rocking and a bit of it hissing on the snow. She conjures another cocoon of webbing and drops the resulting bundle into her blue beaded bag.

She waits until Harry and Ginny have Apparated away, and then she does—only it's to the foyer of her parents' house, to turn back the time-turner five minutes or so, and then to Apparate into the upstairs hallway at the Burrow, far back from the head of the staircase, deep in shadow, as the staircase creaks under footsteps, and Andromeda Tonks appears at the turn of the stair, a look of preoccupation on her face. Not for the first time, she wishes for the surety of Harry's invisibility cloak, and then Andromeda opens a door on the hallway (yes, the same room in which she'd lodged before, though Hermione hadn't remembered that detail). There's a little cry and whimper—Teddy waking—and then Andromeda emerges, the topmost tuft of Teddy's changeable hair just visible behind the drape of the dark winter cloak.

Hermione darts into the room, and sets about her business: shrinking and lightening and packing all of Andromeda's things, searching the closet, the bureau, the bed… Teddy's bed… all of them, everything she imagines is hers. An odd collection of clothes Andromeda has, half of them very traditional wizarding garb and the other half unambiguously Muggle: many pairs of worn jeans, trainers, a pair of hiking boots not unlike Hermione's own, a soft dark-blue chamois shirt, a man's shirt, broad about the shoulders, that must have belonged to Ted…

The work done, she Apparates to the alley outside Purge & Dowse, and finds that her timing has been perfect; Harry, with his arm about frozen Ginny, already is there, and Percy appears with a loud crack in the next moment.

ooo

In the Spell Damage department, Derwent awaits them with her Healer's robes open over dark-green velvet robes with a design of oak leaves and mistletoe on the facings, in sparkling silver and red. She raises one eyebrow as Harry gently levitates Ginny onto the waiting gurney, the snow dropping from the cloak in which he must have swathed her. Once more he has snow in his hair. Ginny's face is frozen into the snarl with which she'd turned to Hermione, her eyes wide and her white lips drawn back over her teeth.

Hermione says, "Professor Slughorn…"

"Is waiting, though he's not sure of his business here."

"Suspected Amortentia poisoning," Percy says, holding up the firewhiskey bottle. Hermione produces the tumblers from her bag. "And we have the drink she was having just before…"

And now, as the experts gather about the evidence, Hermione is thankful that her part is over. Her knees buckle, and Percy helps her into a chair.

ooo

It's only with distant curiosity, through a veil of sudden exhaustion, that she watches Derwent conjure a spiral of pulsating light from her wand-tip, that wraps Ginny as if in a cocoon, showing a clear, vibrant gold-rose … _like the color of the Polyjuice that conjured Tonks,_ she thinks, and wants to cry. Slughorn arrives in his dressing-gown to confer with Derwent, and recommends the standard antidote. A flask appears in Derwent's right hand, and Ginny's face and neck relax, far enough to let her drink.

Percy whispers in her ear, that the antidote a specific against Amortentia dissolved in a solution of standard Sobriety Potion. He adds, "It's not uncommon to administer Amortentia in the second or third glass in a round of Firewhiskey; the initial intoxication, and the heat of the beverage itself, mask the unusual signs." Her education, as usual, continues.

Slughorn adds, rather acerbically, that this is what he was about with the sixth-year Potions demonstration—"to put students on their guard, to suspect something if they should suddenly smell something with marvelous associations …"

Percy says to Hermione, "On our side of the border, a Proustian moment might well be foul play." Hermione raises an eyebrow, and is gratified that Percy smirks.

And then there is the part she shouldn't be seeing: Ginny, released from the body-bind, tears leaking from under her eyelids, involuntarily; Harry taking her hand and chafing it and saying, "It's all right," repeating, with almost unbearable tenderness, "Ginny, it's all right;" Ginny wrapping herself in the cloak, and turning away from him, face to the wall; Percy sitting next to her, stroking her hair, whispering something in a low voice, in the cadences of a lullaby.

Derwent takes Hermione and Harry aside to say, "I think it prudent that she stay the night here."

Harry looks stubborn, and Hermione says, "Harry, we'll be close by. Grimmauld Place…"

Harry says, "I hate that place. I _hate_ it. It's not home."

Hermione says, "It's a safe house. That will have to do."

"But all my things are at the Burrow."

She shakes her head. "I took the liberty…" She pats her blue beaded bag. She looks at Andromeda. "And as much of yours as I could be sure of. Your clothes and Teddy's baby things, for certain." She says, "And Percy's too."

Harry frowns. "But when?"

"About an hour before I arrived. You told me that everyone was downstairs then."

Andromeda says, "What about the security?"

Hermione says, "Harry and I had someone look at the house to upgrade the defenses. Not that they were anything shabby before…"

Andromeda shakes her head. "Werewolves. Dementors."

"We're proof against werewolves. As for Dementors… nobody really knows, but we have at least two members of the Defense Association waiting up for us."

Harry frowns.

"Lavender and Ron will be there when we get there."

"Are they in on this?"

"No, Ron doesn't know, but I think Lavender suspects. Anyway, they'll be meeting us there…" she consults her watch "… in about half an hour."

Percy looks up. "I can stay the night here with her, if you need."

Derwent says, "We'll be putting her under as soon as we're sure we've cleared the last of it out of her system." She adds, "It would be a good thing if you were here when she woke up."

Harry says, "When will that be?" He has on his stubborn look. "I want to be here too."

Derwent says, "Approximately eight o'clock tomorrow morning."

Percy says, "Well, we may as well get a good night's sleep."

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**26 December 1998, early morning**

So now it's confirmed. Derwent wrapped Ginny in wandlight and then watched it flare red-gold at her face and throat and heart… Amortentia, for certain. Poisoning, we're calling it, and the drinks were contaminated, but we don't say _by intention_ though this sort of thing is hardly ever accidental. The only _accident_ with love potions is hitting the wrong target.

Percy told me that the antidote is a specific against the love potion dissolved in Sobriety Potion. I still remember the taste of that—the trace of it on the mind, anyway. One minute you're floating in soft-focus haze and the next you're snapped back to reality, cold light and hard edges with every illusion stripped away. The sensation is like cold air, a sharp bracing atmosphere like a winter night when you step outside a too-close kitchen. The cozy fug dissipates immediately as your sinuses burn blue-white.

A bracing dose of reality. I notice they'll sell you the stuff in any amount you'd like, because none, or very few, get addicted to _that_ sensation. Maybe it's not truth, but it feels like it.

From St. Mungo's, we proceeded to Grimmauld Place.

Unexpectedly I sat up late talking with Ron and Lavender. They're on night-watch, and after that I couldn't sleep, not well anyway, and so we sat by the fire. They didn't hold hands, though it was plain they were thinking of it, and Lavender looked at me and asked if I would come to see her in hospital.

I frowned. "Yes, but that's not for months.."

"Two months," she said. "After the NEWTs." And then she explained the procedure: her child will be finishing its gestation in an enchanted flask originally designed for the nurturing of homunculi. Too many of the cursed wounds from Greyback crisscross the fascial planes of the abdomen; the integrity is fatally compromised. Lavender never will be able to bear children the usual way, and even this time is risky.

Ron chimed in, unexpectedly, and explained the technique yet further. They weren't his words or even his intonation; he was copying someone else's explanation, more or less word for word.

Odd, how it seemed to give him comfort to explain it. He gave me a look of complicity. Yes, now he does understand something about me, I think, though rather too late… and no, I'm not the one for him.

I know that because I felt relief at Lavender's presence next to him. She'll see them both through it, for all she's the patient.

And then Lavender got up, slowly and painfully, to go down the hall to the loo and he looked at me and said, "I was thinking all through dinner that it might have been you." I nodded, because it must have been plain I was thinking the same thing. We pretend, but then there's the past to contradict us. Maybe some day all of this will be neutral and we'll forget we've ever felt this strongly, but that won't happen any time soon.

He looked at me. "I've been a right git, and I know it. I'm sorry for all of it. You didn't have to do this, but I'm really glad you did." He said, "Bill talked to me…"

"About me."

"About everybody I'd best not hurt, and what loyalty meant, and how much I had to make up for. He all but took my head off when I told him Lavender was pregnant." He added, with some bitterness, "What dad should have said, but it was mum had a problem with it. Though now she's happy, because she has two grandchildren on the way…"

I said I'd every intention of standing by Lavender in this…

… and him too, it would seem. They'll be married on Valentine's Day, right before the NEWTs. A very small ceremony, Rita Skeeter very definitely not invited… but me, for certain, if I didn't bear him too many bad feelings.

"It's been two years, Ron," I said, and he startled, and I said, "Time-turner. I've been busy. I suppose half the world knows now."

ooo

Percy found me as I was staring into the fire, too exhausted to sleep and thinking again about the gift I hadn't brought to the visit tomorrow. Should I take one more trip with the time-turner? Though that would mean hours, days, further back than I'd ever gone before. Before Christmas Eve, and then to some Muggle district, no, back even further, because I hadn't any idea what to get for Neville or his Gran, because I hadn't been thinking on presents at all, but the banishing of the Dementors, and then the rescue of Ginny.

Percy took hold of my arm, and excused us, and we walked down the hall.

We sat, or rather, I sat and Percy stood behind me, and then he conjured a mirror, and said, "Look at yourself."

I looked. The girl in the mirror was me, black pits of eyes shadowed by thick hair, and yes, she was a bit thin… but I didn't see the skull beneath the skin the way I had in the seven midnights of Christmas Eve.

Percy said, "You are two years older than you ought to be. Nobody's noticed, have they?"

He said, "You're addicted to that thing. It solves all problems, doesn't it?" His hand closed over mine, and it was surprisingly strong: long white fingers with calluses in odd places, a scrivener's hand. He said, "You were thinking of using it again, weren't you?"

I am terrified, even thinking of how closely he must have been watching me. I am not gifted with stealth, that much I know. He said, "What was it this time?"

I said, "Neville." From the expression on Percy's face, that hadn't cleared things up, so I added, "Boxing Day. Tomorrow. I have an invitation for tomorrow morning, and I haven't gotten him any sort of gift…" Then, to my shame, the tears ran down my face, and Percy put down the mirror, and closed his arms around me. "Oh but you have," he said. "You have. Ginny. You rescued Ginny."

"Andromeda rescued Ginny."

"All of us together, but we wouldn't have managed it without you. You should go to sleep, now."

I shook my head. "I can't sleep."

The flask was in his hand, deep-violet. I recognized it. "Dreamless Sleep."

He took my tea cup, and measured off a draught. "Enough for six hours. You'll be rested. But promise me… no more time-turner."

I shook my head. "I can't promise you that. There's too much work." I said, "But I will try to be sensible about it. No using it for shopping jaunts." I said, "Don't think of taking the time-turner while I sleep, either."

He nodded, and then smiled as I cast the protective spells anyway. He saw me to the couch in the library, and gave me a blanket, and only then did I consent to take the cup from his hands.

Percy said, "Tell Neville what you've done. That's the best Christmas gift any of us have had in a while."

"But it's not done. I 'm not even sure…"

"None of us are sure." He tucked the blanket under my chin, and said, "Now drink."

I drank, and then the darkness drank me.


	56. Chapter 56

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Hermione wakes in the dark, with the blanket still tucked under her chin. She's lying in the same position in which she had fallen asleep, on the couch where she had slept a year ago, two years ago, holding hands with Ron as he slept. In the hall outside, the floor creaks under someone's footsteps; she hears a tap between each of the footsteps: Lavender with her cane, most likely. She sits up to look at her watch. It's not much past seven. She woke, of course, because only the sledgehammer of Dreamless Sleep can keep off the endless cycling of worry, and now that the Potion has released her, she's remembering all too clearly that she doesn't have a gift for Neville or his Gran, and it's impossible to make up the difference.

She gets up and slips down the hall for a quick hot wash and a change of clothes out of the blue beaded bag: outdoor clothes, for Longbottom House is chilly, and likely she and Neville will take a walk outdoors. Over that, formal robes, the dark ones, because she isn't feeling particularly festive. She brushes out her hair, listening to the static electricity crackle and show as blue sparks in the dimness, and takes a last look at herself in the mirror. It will have to be good enough.

As she opens the door to the hall, she sees Percy. Even in the dim flare of the gas-jets he looks appalling, his face pale and the glint of silver in his hair. He shouldn't be showing grey yet, not for years, but that's the postwar.

He looks at her and nods good morning, as Harry emerges from shadow behind him, followed by Ron and Lavender, who look tired from the night watch for Dementors. No doubt their nerves have been on edge, because when a Patronus is required, it is required on _short notice_ and a moment's inattention could be fatal. Not that Grimmauld Place doesn't have some of the best defenses in wizarding Britain, but there are things that even the best defense architects don't know, because they are Most Secret, and by design. How many of those soul-suckings could have been prevented?

Ron smiles at her, as he opens a bedroom door for Lavender.

"Sleep well," she says to them.

Ron is still an attractive man, with his height and his mop of red hair and his bright eyes and fair skin, but she notices that at a distance. No, they never got along as a couple, but she can admire him esthetically… much as she can admire Percy. In another world, admiring Percy could be a parlous business; not long ago, the resemblance to Ron might have gotten her in trouble, along with her admiration for his deeds of valor in the Ministry. Had she absentmindedly sipped that spiked drink, that scene with Percy in the front room might not have been play-acting. Even absent Amortentia, people fall into bed on the battlefield all the time.

Neville and Ginny, for example. Neville and Hannah.

Percy is saying to Harry. "I can't go back to the Burrow, you know. It's Boxing Day but I'm not a Weasley any more, not if you ask my mother."

Harry says, in that fierce stubborn tone she knows so well, "You _are_ a Weasley. Just like Ron. Just like Bill." He adds, "You saved Ginny. I owe you a life debt on her account. You can stay here, as long as you like." His mouth quirks as if tasting something bitter. "I'm the Heir to the House of Black, after all. And Grimmauld Place is convenient to the Ministry …" A pause, and a change of subject: "Dean and Luna should be up soon."

Hermione says, "I'm expected at Longbottom House for breakfast, but if you need me there when Ginny wakes up …"

Harry squares his shoulders. "Percy and I will handle it. Ginny's in a bad way. She's been hateful to you and Neville …" He frowns. "She couldn't let go of that. She thought I'd been with you the way that she'd been with Neville."

"Oh," Hermione says.

"Ginny told me that she'd been thinking of me, and Neville was thinking of someone else. They were both missing Luna. They didn't know how they were going to go on without her. It doesn't matter," Harry says. "It was wartime. We didn't have such a bad time of it on the run. It was Hogwarts that was hell."

At first she thinks he's coughing, and then she sees the tears running down his face. "Oh, Harry," she says. He looks utterly lost and ashamed, and she puts her arms around him, as much to avoid seeing his face as to offer comfort. She tells him that he's right, it was wartime, and one shouldn't …

"Someone _dosed_ her," he says in a harsh wet whisper. "Someone in her _family._ She'll never forgive herself. She acted on all her worst thoughts…"

Percy says, in a voice so cold it doesn't even sound like him, "I think the magistrates of the Wizengamot mistook themselves, centuries ago, when they failed to class _all_ means of compulsion as Unforgivable. It is a curious point of our law that only the Imperius Curse is so designated."

The door behind them opens and she sees the weary face of Andromeda Tonks, holding Teddy in her arms; for a split second she does think _Bellatrix Lestrange as the Madonna_, unfair as that is to the woman who helped them pull off Ginny's rescue when they hadn't had a plan.

Andromeda says to Harry, "Everything will be a great deal easier on a solid breakfast. I do know my way around that kitchen, though Kreacher used to chase us off every time he found us poaching on his territory." She adds, "You may not know it, but your late godfather was a dab hand with an omelet, and I taught him everything he knew."

Percy adds, in a crisp sensible tone, "Certainly one can't expect to sort this out with only tea and biscuits on one's stomach. That's one thing you learn in the refugee office. Even a hopeless situation looks a great deal more cheerful on a full stomach."

Hermione offers her help. Harry wipes his eyes and says, "No, you've got a Boxing Day breakfast date with Neville and his Gran, and in any case, you're absolute _pants_ at cooking."

"Fat lot of gratitude _you_ have," she says, swatting at him. "Who was the chef on the Camping Trip from Hell?"

Harry smiles ruefully. "You were," he says. "So you've got a lifetime dispensation."

"And a pension, I would hope," she says, and then starts, because the question of money is no joking matter.

He looks at her levelly, takes off his spectacles, and wipes his eyes. "You're right," he says. "We'll talk about it when you come back."

She knows she's stalling, putting off the inevitable, because the kitchen is just downstairs and it's simple, just step through the fire… Yes, she has good news; no, she hasn't any gift… and she has no idea what she'd bring, if she brought something. It's the recurring nightmare about learning the assignment too late, and having no idea what to do with it anyway.

She can feel each muscle in her smile, as if she's memorizing how to do it.

Percy says, "Don't worry." She feels raw and irritable at his irresponsible cheer. She knows she doesn't have quite enough sleep, and bites back the retort that springs to mind, _what would you know about it, _because he _does _know.

"I suppose not," she says. "So after Ginny is awake… what are you going to do?"

"We'll come back, I suppose, and talk about what to do next. Some time past noon, I'd imagine."

"Well, call me then. I should be there still." Thinking about another meeting to attend calms her. Planning calms her; making an inventory of the disaster calms her. Then there's the stack of reading waiting back home. But she won't think about that just now.

It's a holiday, Boxing Day, and between the curtains in the front room, in the blue light of pre-dawn, she sees that snow is falling, an old-fashioned snow that might have been scripted out of Dickens.

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Boxing Day, 11pm**

Over breakfast, Gran questioned me about what had happened. She frowned, and asked how Andromeda Tonks was bearing up. I told her all right, so far as I could tell, and then we fell silent, and as I ate, I thought about what that question implied. Andromeda had been staying with Molly… so far as I could tell, because it wasn't safe in her own house.

I asked, finally. She frowned and said, "You didn't know."

I shook my head. So she told the story of how Andromeda had shown up to the Ministry party following the Order of Merlin awards ceremony, dressed in Muggle clothes with a traveling cloak thrown over them, and Teddy in her arms.

She'd been invited, of course, but had begged off, pleading exhaustion. That same evening, the house had been attacked by werewolves, en masse—almost as if someone had thrown them against that particular location. Greyback wasn't alive to be doing that, so of course there was speculation. Certainly everyone was clear that Remus was the reason for it—or maybe Teddy, as Remus's son.

So the trouble had begun immediately, a mere week after the battle. How long had our interval of peace really been?

Neville was looking at me, every time I looked up. Gran had seated us opposite each other; I sat in the place usually occupied by Draco, who was asleep upstairs, having sat up late preparing for the NEWTs. I remembered that he'd been anticipating that visit from his parents, so I asked how he'd taken it.

Neville told me that Draco had been very quiet afterward, and had gone up to his room early. When Neville had looked in on him around nine o'clock, he'd been revising Potions, with books and notes spread out on the desk.

Gran said it was a pity that it took the prospect of Azkaban to make some people settle to doing what they should have been doing in the first place. Then she was silent, in which silence I continued the thought: that Draco had gotten his wish to be conspicuous, though not quite in the way he'd hoped. Even if by some miracle he wasn't sent to prison, he would be a living reminder of his family's sins… well, as he'd been for McConnell, apparently.

I remembered the reports I'd read, the ones about which I could not speak, and wondered just how many more years Lucius had left, even if he weren't sent to prison… and avoiding that fate was going to take a miracle. Not that the Malfoys hadn't wriggled out of it before, as everyone reminded me. The War Crimes Commission were coming perilously close to recommending that he be re-tried for his crimes during the First War, which would set a very bad precedent. If we'd done dodgy things during the war, me and Harry and Ron, then likely the adult members of the Order had done more, and if the Ministry could come back at any moment and revisit things…

Neville smiled at me, with something of puzzlement in it, and I realized that I'd been staring into space, with my fork halfway to my mouth.

"Work," I said. "Sorry."

Gran said that the Aurors had been quite keen on hanging about in the room - all six of them. They all seemed on edge about the possibility of an escape attempt.

Apparently it's an open secret why the parents and the son are being kept in custody separately. No doubt the three of them in a room excites thought that they might make a break for it… except that Lucius is in a bad way physically, Draco can't do much in the way of ordinary magic, and Narcissa can be kept in check with those two hostages.

Gran briskly changed the subject after that—there's such a thing as too much of any topic—and proposed that we might take a walk while she cleared up some correspondence after breakfast. Neville's face brightened at that suggestion.

The weather was equivocal, but she trusted Neville to mind the sky and his watch.

I looked out to the lowering sky, darker than the ground, that dragged its shaggy belly across the distant crest of Pendle Hill. In the foreground, just inside one of the doors to the terrace, a sprig of mistletoe hung on a ribbon. I smiled, and when I looked at Neville, he blushed and looked down, as if the answer to some very important question were written on his plate.

ooo

I watched Neville's hands, as they deployed knife and fork, with perfect form, in spite of his flustered look, his downcast eyes and pink cheeks.

He didn't hesitate, as I do sometimes. No, he knew exactly what to do, and did it with perfect grace. His hands were large and the fingers blunt-tipped, but their touch precise and gentle.

He looked up at me, and his blush deepened.

I remembered his hands stroking my hair, and his arms around me, in the hallway outside the visitors' tea room at St. Mungo's. That hadn't meant at all the same thing then as it would mean now, or that it had meant when we sat side by side on the couch in his rooms after that interminable tour with Draco, after the glass of firewhiskey and … yes, his confession about Hannah, when I kissed him on the chin and he asked me not to do something I'd regret later.

ooo

After all, there had been hints, even as we first had sat down to breakfast.

As Neville held the chair for me, he leaned forward and murmured, rather close to my ear, "Thank you." When I shrugged, he said, "Don't. Percy said you were _instrumental_." He added, "He said you were fussed about not having gifts for anyone. You needn't worry. Having Ginny safe and sound, that's gift enough." Then he closed his hands gently over my shoulders, warm and reassuring, but rather an intimate gesture to be making with his Gran in the room.

"She's going to be a while recovering," I said. "Derwent said it would be three days at least before she'd be coming home. Not to the Burrow. Grimmauld Place. Harry and Ron and Lavender and Percy and Luna and Dean."

He took his seat opposite me. "So the whole lot of them relocated. They'd been talking about it."

"And Andromeda and Teddy," I added.

Neville frowned. "Then it's bad."

"Fairly bad, yes," I said. Talking disaster with Neville, as with his Gran or with Percy, cheered me with its reminder that we were all in the conspiracy together, even if everything were falling apart.

In particular, he and I were _together._

Gran added dryly that she'd had an owl from Percy Weasley, with news and a request for further conversation, and I felt my face heat, remembering what Percy had told me, that I found scarcely plausible… that he was in love with her. I felt a sort of dread for him, because I couldn't imagine it being reciprocated. In the morning light, Augusta Longbottom had the look of stone that her grandson only tried to imitate.

And then I wanted to laugh, because Percy wasn't the only one in my generation, except that Draco had fallen for a rather younger version of her, and that in a painting.

ooo

It was between one forkful of buttered eggs and the next (under Neville's smile of beneficent approval) that I decided that I was going to take advantage, or at least take the initiative. Gran had talked about the weather this morning for walking, and her gesture toward the doors to the terrace took in as well the bunch of mistletoe dangling on its ribbon. I don't think it was the meteorological notes that made Neville turn pink.

The mistletoe, no doubt, was traditional.

From that moment forward I felt calm, because the matter had been settled.

It settled other things, as well.

As we closed the doors to the terrace and set off on our walk, I asked him about how it really had worked, seventh year, him and Luna and Ginny. To my surprise, he told me.

It had been clearest of all to Luna that the Defense Association, Dumbledore's Army, was the key, that they had troops they could call up – not that Luna Lovegood put it precisely that way, not being conversant with the Muggle notion of an army – but secret things she most certainly did understand, in particular conspiracies, having been raised by a father who wrote about them unceasingly in the_ Quibbler._

Luna had the plans (or, more precisely, the vision), and Ginny had the daring, and he… well, he knew about safety, and the Room of Requirement, and the importance of protecting the weak. Though he didn't put it that way exactly, but I remembered Seamus talking about how brilliantly Neville had understood how the Room worked, how you had to ask it for exactly what you needed… _needed_, not wanted.

Neville said that Luna had _faith…_ a dreamy conviction that it was all going to work out, and fifteen impossible ideas about how to make that happen. When Luna was taken, there was a terrible moment when he and Ginny almost lost faith, because it had gone with her.

And then, a propos of nothing we'd discussed, he told me that he finally recognized the look on my face this last month. Harry had looked so, when he'd told him to kill the snake. Something dangerous is afoot, he knows, and he knows as well that I can't speak of it.

Nonetheless, he said, he is there should I need him.

I nodded, and we walked on in silence. Everything else that happened today, followed from that.

ooo

The sky is overcast, and even in the morning, it's darker than the snow. The landscape resembles a snow-scene by Bruegel, with the details, trees and houses and the wooded rise of Pendle Hill, picked out against grey sky and featureless white ground, white of exemplary purity, because new-fallen. There's something oddly heavenly about a fresh snowfall, before human footprints dot it, and the passing cars churn roadways into grey slush.

Neville looks handsome against the snowbound landscape, with his dark hair and fair skin and the rosy flush in his cheeks, and his dark jacket and his jeans and the flash of a smile as he points out the little things that she mightn't have noticed, because he has known them since childhood.

They fall into step together. His legs are longer, but she's always been in a hurry, and her strides are quicker than his. Perhaps she learned that as a child keeping up with her parents, except she never remembered feeling hurried by them. There was always something further ahead, that she needed to reach.

She has had very few moments of repose, simply noticing things, one reason she finds these walks so restful. They're stitched together of moments like that… like the moment outside the greenhouses, in winter weather—where did she hear that? Neville. Talking to the Hogsmeade villagers and the war orphans about his happiest memory.

The war orphans. Wilhelmina. It was to Wilhelmina he said that, the ringleader of the Hufflepuff gang.

But they're working on that problem. Percy. Kingsley. The people of good will, such as Neville's Gran. "I didn't think I'd ever live to see a day when their names were being used to justify torture." Gran is a woman of principle. She needn't think she's carrying the whole thing alone.

Neville slows his pace, and takes hold of her hand, to help her over a stile... an archaic gesture, which might look well if she were in Victorian skirts. As it is, she's more than capable of taking the few steps, in her jeans and modern outdoor gear, but she doesn't refuse the gesture. She likes the feel of his hand, large and warm and careful, enclosing hers, and she smiles a little to realize that he's taking an excuse—an opportunity—of touching her.

The air is fresh and chill, and the fine snow stings her face, unmediated by a warming charm, because after all, it is not snowbound Scotland, in the mountains, and it's daylight, and she likes the feel of it. A brisk walk, to work up an appetite for the midday meal, which will be similarly grand and heavy, in that dining room with the heavy furniture from the Victorian era, from his Gran's mother's time. Sophonisba Chattox, who had overseen the improvement of the Floo. They'd had the Floo system for centuries, but the improvements made in the nineteenth century meant that one needed only the name to get there… and vagaries of pronunciation were smoothed out, and the whole of the British Isles, and some of Ireland, linked up hearth to hearth…

Neville's hair blows about his face: dark against his pink cheeks, which would look innocent except for the livid white scars across his cheekbones. For the briefest moment, she sees what Nigel must see: _disfiguring scars_ on a face that isn't chiseled or handsome or distinctive… and then it's overwritten by what it means, the whole history behind that face, beginning with the powerful resemblance to his mother Alice, the _permanently disabled war hero_ of a conflict Nigel doesn't even know about, whose outcome (unknown to him) saved him from death or ignominious slavery. Neville's scars may not be pretty, but they are more than honorable. So are her own, in this warrior society.

He stops, and smiles at her, and says, "A knut for your thoughts. Or a penny, if you'd have that."

She says, "Honorable scars, and the Floo system, and snowscapes by Peter Bruegel, and the odd sorts of thoughts that will summon a Patronus." She adds, "And the awful mess of the post-war, but that goes without saying."

He smiles. "I thought it might be something of that sort."

She frowns, and laughs, "So there's a particular look I have that corresponds to thoughts about the Floo System?"

He smiles in return, and it's actually a cousin of that look she remembered from their argument about the memory charms, on a walk like this in the summer. _I know the sorts of things you get up to_, that look had said, only this time it's wholly fond.

The wave of desire that hits her is as powerful as it is unexpected. She remembers Tonks, and thinks how she'd like to accidentally trip and fall into Neville's arms, except there's no practical way to arrange that, and she doesn't have the reputation for clumsiness that will let her pretend it was an accident. In any case, indirection has never been her strong suit.

She is going to come about it straightforwardly. With a little help from that mistletoe in the French doors to the terrace. Yes.

ooo

The threatened snow comes down slowly at first, and then more thickly, and as the distance disappears in mist and snow, Neville says with some regret that it might be best to turn back.

Hermione nods and then shivers a little, thinking of the mistletoe.

"Are you cold?" he asks. She can tell that he's restraining himself from apologizing for the weather.

"No, just thinking about how snow makes the indoors feel cozy."

He smiles, and says, "Let's set off home, then. Gran will be in her study until afternoon with correspondence."

If she didn't mistake that, he has just said that they'd have an opportunity of some time alone.

ooo

On the terrace, they stamp the snow from their feet, and Neville opens the double doors in their deep casements. Time slows. There is the mistletoe, and the quiet of the house—snowfall on a winter morning, the winter morning of Boxing Day.

He looks at the clock, and says they've been out scarcely an hour. He is standing in the doorway to the terrace, the snow still melting on his hair, and the light soft and shadowless on him. Standing _under the mistletoe_. No time like the present.

She says, "If I'm not being too forward…" (Why did she begin with a preface like that? it must be the influence of the house) … "there _is_ something I'd like to give you this morning. _Not_ in company."

He stands stock still for a moment, until she leans in on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. His skin is chilly and smells deliciously of fresh air and some sort of spicy scent… and it is velvet-smooth to the touch of her lips.

_Oh_, she realizes, _he's taken particular trouble over it_. Courteous, as always, that forethought.

She decides that the mistletoe gives her license for a bit more, and she puts her fingertips to his cheek, to stroke it and to turn his mouth toward her. His hands rest lightly on her waist, and he has shifted so she is no longer on tiptoe but kissing him as if he weren't very much taller than she.

His closed lips are chilly at first, and then warm, very warm, and she disengages to whisper in his ear, "The mistletoe," to which he replies, "I know." He says, "Yes, I know."

He's standing braced against the deep wall of the doorway, his legs out to either side of her. He smiles. "I thought you'd like a proper kiss."

"Oh no, that wasn't a proper kiss," she whispers. "_This_ is." She leans in and puts her lips on his, and kisses him, and then thinks, _now or never_, and realizes, as she leans in and opens her mouth—and his—to deepen the kiss, that he's meeting her halfway, for he's been waiting … and as she presses her body against his, that he's excited, has clearly been so for some time, and … nonetheless he's still shy, the lightness of his touch asking permission as he puts his hands on her waist, between the ribcage and the high arch of the hipbones, as if they were in a ballroom, and not… in a doorway, under the mistletoe, with the assurance that his Gran would not be in evidence until afternoon.

She steps in even further, and pushes his head back against the wall, and she kisses him more aggressively than she's yet kissed anyone.

Not that there is _anyone else_ at this moment. Only Neville, and his flushed face, and the quivering tension in his body, and the held breath, and the very faint rock of the hips—that he stills with what she knows is iron discipline, given how very excited he is.

What does for her, finally, is not his excitement but his discipline, the sense of passion restrained. She starts to kiss his neck, with open mouth and little nipping bites, and her fingers unbutton the top button on his shirt. He gasps, "Oh. Oh god."

"Is that all right?" she asks, as if it were a question - which it might still be.

"Oh, yes," he says, and it comes out in a sigh that's absolutely the most voluptuous sound she's ever heard. "Anything… anything you want." Those words stab through her with a pang of pleasure that almost buckles her knees, as her fingers undo the next buttons, and the next, until she can tug the shirt down over his shoulders, without removing his coat; she's thinking of that satiny skin, and the heat of it; she tugs the tails out of his trousers, and kisses her way across his chest… as he throws his head back.

She has to stop, just to look: his eyes are closed, and he's holding his breath, and still keeping his hands in place, as if they were dancing a slow and respectable waltz.

The urge to _push things_ takes her, and she loosens the shirt around his shoulders, and pushes it down to bare his arms and chest. He groans as she brushes them with her lips, as her hands move up his back, under the shirt, memorizing his skin…

It's when her fingertips slide inside the waist of his trousers, in back, that she feels his hips jerk against her and he says, "Hermione… oh."

"If that means 'don't do it unless I mean it,' then know that I mean it," she whispers. "And I mean _you_, Neville. You are _not_ a proxy for anyone else. You are the one I want."

His whole body arches up to her. She knows, without question, that if she were to continue unbuttoning and unzipping and roving with her hands, he would not stop her until he stood naked in the chilly air from the terrace—for he hasn't entirely closed the door—letting her have her will with him, whatever that will might be. It's nearly unbearably sexy, beyond anything she's ever read in a book or seen in a film. Not something that Hermione Granger would be doing with Neville Longbottom.

That's good. She can still remember her name, and his. Best to strike while that's yet the case.

"Neville," she says, and he shivers at the sound of his name, "I think we should…"

"It's fine if you want to stop," he says, in a tone that makes it clear that the words are offered out of pure duty, with his last ounce of control…

"Not stop, Neville. Relocate. Somewhere… less public. If that would be possible."

ooo

They climb the stairs, in the snowy gloom, and the ancestors whisper to each other, and she's not sure if they're scandalized or merely taking notes, nor does she know how much of this will go back to Gran, but the warmth of Neville's hand in hers is too tempting. She knows where they are going, up the stairs in the dark. It's drafty and cool and the stairs creak; and she can feel the warmth of his body next to hers, can smell the fresh air on him, embedded in his clothes, that sharp cold smell of coming snow and chill air.

The room is at the end of the hall and when he opens the door to it, they cross the threshold into another world. There are books everywhere, field guides to the moors, gardeners' and greenhouse manuals, tomes magical and Muggle, and there, high on a shelf in a place of honor stands the history of botanical illustration that she bought him for his birthday… a year ago, two years ago, however long it's been in her timeline.

There are books everywhere, and there are plants; the room is warm and the plants stand between the warm core of the room and the exterior, the landscape of snow and mist. She wonders what it would be like to wake in that room with the morning sun coming through that screen of leaves. There's a bed and a chair and a desk, somewhere in the drift of books and plants. The bed is made up neatly. There are no scattered papers on the floor, or (as in Ron's old room) discarded clothes.

There is a barrier of warm air between the windows and the plants, so that they may enjoy the maximum of light, he explains. Amazing, this place. She never would have suspected—or even speculated—what his room looked like, and now it seems oddly inevitable. Of course it looks like this. How else would it look?

He turns to her and she lets go of his fingers, and he puts arms around her and very slowly draws her close; she can feel his fingertips, his palms, his arms reading her body's reaction, the little language of shifts and flinches and shivers. She knows that if she froze or stiffened he would gracefully let go. She swallows, feeling her tongue and lips, the teeth, the pulse in her throat. She's alive, and he's next to her, skin to skin, their forearms touching, her fingers feeling the tiny shifts in the muscles of his forearms. She can feel his breath hitch, his body shift to mold itself to her roving palms; he wants to be touched, wants her to touch him, her in particular because it's her he wants.

She finds herself standing on tiptoe to kiss him again, and he whispers, "No. Let's be comfortable."

He takes her hand, and indicates they should sit.

There's no sofa, of course, so they sit… on his bed. He's half-dressed, or half-undressed, the coat cast aside and the shirt half off. He moves to one side, to make more room for her.

It would be neutral, except that they're sitting… on his bed. A bed is only a piece of furniture, she reminds herself. It could as well be a divan. What makes it highly equivocal is his look … what one might call a smoldering glance, dark, very dark, _the pupils dilated_, yes, a sign of interest. As is the other, quite plain now in her peripheral vision. She has a shiver of pure bodily identification, remembering how she stood in front of the mirror, wrapped in a sheet… and this body.

He doesn't ask her why she's suddenly so shy, because he's plainly feeling the same sense of a terrifying pause, at the edge of the cliff.

On the other hand, she had resolved… to take advantage. To make use of opportunities, and really there isn't any impediment, is there?

Certainly none in the face before her. Everything is heightened: the color, the look of seriousness, even the contrast of hair and eyes with skin: dark against rosy, flushed, … _passionate_, what she wouldn't have called him, because usually that's noisy rather than stolid and patient.

As soon as she touches him again, he shivers, and she says, "Fair is fair," and shrugs out of her jacket, and brings his fingertips to the buttons on her shirt. He understands right away, though the look on his face once the slightly chilly air touches her skin… frightens her. It's solemn, reverent, a little frightened itself, utterly serious, and restrained. Something very powerful is being held back, like the Pacific behind a dam.

He touches her in return, very tentatively. He traces her collarbones, the margin of her ribcage, the flare of the hip crests, as if he did not dare to stray from bones onto flesh. He's looking at her, just as she is looking at him. His hand travels across her belly, his palm flat and warm and his touch firm, so not to tickle her. He reads the zigzag scar correctly. "Department of Mysteries," he says. "I was so worried that you were going to die. That you had died." She doesn't remember of course, but they had told her later that he was the one who had carried her.

_One of my own. One of my own kind, and on my own side. Those names would have meant nothing to Nigel. I couldn't have even spoken them. _

She kisses his cheek, feeling the scars on his face; when she looks up, Neville is looking at her, with his eyes dark and his face flushed. His gaze is frightened and worshipful.

"Neville, it's just me," she whispers. Not some transcendent vision of beauty, she means. She never thought she'd have a pang of this kind of fellow-feeling for Fleur Delacour —unseen behind the mask of her beauty — or in her own case, behind whatever it is that Neville sees, which is not something she's ever seen in her mirror.

"Yes, it's you," he replies. He leans in, very slowly, and kisses her on the mouth.

His lips move lightly over her cheek, her ear, her neck. They find the minute silvery line she'd even forgotten was there. As soon as he touches it with his lips she remembers the cold silver blade against her neck, and that voice in her ear, Bellatrix the killer as close to her as Neville is now.

He asks if it's all right, what he's doing.

"Yes… only that place … that's from Bellatrix." Unexpectedly she's shivering. She thought she was over this. She pulls away, abruptly. "I'm sorry. You endured a lot more."

He puts an arm around her, and she feels the warmth that he seems to radiate as easily as his kindness. "No, it's not the same. The Carrows were only trying to scare me. I always knew they were only going to go so far with a pureblood. And when I suspected otherwise, I had time to make myself scarce." He strokes her back and draws her head down to rest on his shoulder, kisses her on the forehead, and adds in a whisper, "Bellatrix was _known _for no limits. She had at me once, you know. Probably not more than five minutes, and that was _more_ than enough."

She's shivering now, teeth chattering, as if someone had broken the window and let the winter wind blow through. "It was only half an hour. Not even that." _Except I thought I was going to die, and I would have, had things gone just a little differently._

He doesn't say anything, just holds her. Of course it's not going to be all right, not for a very long time to come. He knows. He has nightmares of his own; she remembers that he was still dreaming about the snake, only a few months ago.

Finally he says, "It's all right, if you don't want…"

"No," she says fiercely, "Bellatrix is dead, and she's not taking _this_ away from me." She kisses him on the shoulder. Solid, nicely cushioned, the skin like satin except where it's scarred. Sumptuous, she thinks, the word that came to mind when she was lying back against him at Harry's birthday party, having her nose repaired. _Unendurably attractive_, she'd thought in the pub back in October, and reached for another round to drown the thought.

Drunk or else having her nose fixed, those have been the only times she's gotten a taste of that, until now.

She laughs, and he asks her what's funny. To her great surprise, she tells him everything she's just been thinking, even the perverse thought she had in the pub, that she ought to thank Ginny for breaking her nose in the first place because it gave her the opportunity to have Neville fix it. "Which is going a bit far, I think," she says.

"I liked that part about being unendurably attractive," he says, kissing her again. "Could you give me a foot or so of parchment on that?"

"Oh, well, if you like," she says, "but I would have thought you would have preferred the demonstration to the essay." She says, consciously teasing, "I've always admired how practical you are. Hands on, so to speak."

He kisses her, to tell her he does rather prefer the demonstration.

ooo

The first touch of skin to skin is still a shock, and they both hiss in apprehension.

"Don't forget," he mutters, and reaches for the packet on the bedside, just as she's fishing in the blue beaded bag for the same.

Their eyes meet, and they laugh – yes, they're both cautious, and thinking of the consequences.

Yes, indeed, precautions must be taken. Draco's Polyjuice impersonation of Neville had been utterly in character. You can take precautions and still make it sexy, she would have explained, but there's no need for explanation. The suspense is delicious, yes, as she tears open the packet, as she kisses him and unrolls it, as his eyelids flutter and he tries to keep himself still …

She reaches as well for her wand on the bedside table, because one must make sure of everything. He nods in approval, for all he's mostly beyond speech, and she thinks, _a well-brought-up and considerate young man_, not all of whose courtesies belong to the Edwardian age. Some of them are quite contemporary and up-to-date.

"Now," she whispers, "Neville." He seems to like it, that she repeats his name.

"Hermione," he says, and he's biting his lip.

"No need to hold back, now," she says.

He doesn't.

The first time does not last very long, and he's apologetic (which she could have predicted) and then he says very firmly that yes, he's perfectly well aware that there will be another chance, and meanwhile he's going to indulge himself in a long-standing fantasy (with her permission of course), which is to please her every way he can … and he has had some time to think on the question. Yes. There are years of premeditation in every caress, from head to foot, and for the first time he sounds _wicked_, throaty and teasing, as he asks how she likes _this_.

And _this_.

And _this_.

ooo

There is the snow and mist outside the windows, and the lovely leaf-light and the comfortable book-lined room, and then there is the face above her, next to her, and those eyes on hers as his fingers move over her skin. She's thrilled by the sleepy dangerous look of him, lips parted and eyes locked on hers. She'd never thought of him as dangerous before, except that it's clear that he is, so near is she to utter annihilation, poised deliciously on the verge of the precipice, as he whispers that he's dreamed about this for _years_. As he kisses her, there's a perverse voice in the back of her mind that wonders where he learned _that_, what he's doing with such insidious gentleness with his fingers, so that she's on the brink after so little time, or maybe it's just that he pays attention.

_Attention to the other's reactions can make up for great deficits in experience, actually,_ says the reasonable observing voice in her head (it's somewhere out past the orbit of Jupiter by now) and she's embarrassed, but only a little, that the place he's so carefully stroking has turned into the pivot of the world…

… as her hips follow those motions, and she makes small inarticulate noises that nonetheless he seems to understand quite well. He's very pleased by them, it would seem, because he's crooning softly as he kisses her neck, and her shoulders, while keeping up that delightful rhythm down below.

The kisses move south, until he's kneeling between her knees and she's lying astonished thinking that this was not at all the gift she had expected, no, and it feels rather personal to … to be burying her hands in his hair (nice thick hair, silky and warm as sunlight) to signal her delight, although what's happening under his tongue ought to be signal enough, and the scariest thing of all, is that he _knows_, and the knowledge won't be used against her, except to delight her further. Nonetheless it's frightening to be so thoroughly _understood_, bodily.

Then the moment comes when she is no longer reasoning about the experience, but only shuddering as it all gathers and then ripples outward in starry shivers of delight.

He holds her through all the changes, and when she comes to, she finds his eyes on hers.

"Oh, my," she says. "That was _amazing._"

He nods, and says that he rather liked it, and is glad that she did as well, and might she like another try, because he thinks he will do a bit better this time.

ooo

They are beginning again, for the third time. She's giggling that practice makes perfect, though there are tears on her cheeks, as there are on his, as she kneels over him, settling in, and he agrees that really it does take two or three tries, like most things. "But it's much more fun than dueling practice," he says, and they both laugh. She feels silly and light-headed, utterly comfortable in her skin as if it were silk pajamas and she were someone very much more sybaritic than she is. This is luxurious and decadent, like eating chocolates all day in bed, curled up in a nest of books.

The parchment slides under the door and whisks itself up to the bedside table, snapping itself open on the tabletop with imperious precision. She sees it and shakes her head. "No, we have _something to finish_," and begins. He groans, and tells her that he has no choice but to obey, though words are really superfluous because his body has already begun to answer her in kind.

When they have finished, Neville reaches over to the nightstand and picks up the parchment. He reads it and then turns bright red and groans, the ordinary sort of groan.

"It's Gran," he says, "and we're wanted downstairs. _When we're quite finished, _she says."

It's just past noon.


	57. Chapter 57

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

"When you're quite finished." Hermione reads Gran's note again, smiling in spite of herself, as Neville dresses. She smiles, as well, though in a rather different way, as he looks up from buttoning his shirt and turns pink.

"That was rather a lot of fun," she says, "if that's what you were wondering." She leans over and kisses him on the cheek.

He glances at the parchment and his blush deepens. "She knows."

"Of course she knows. So do half the portraits in the house… well, all of them, by now."

He takes a deep breath and visibly gathers his courage. She stands and holds out her hand. "Since everyone knows…"

They hold hands descending the staircase, as ascending it. The portraits whisper to each other, as before. Neville stops at the foot of the staircase. Gran is not in sight, but the elf meets them—taking shape out of the gloom, in Apparition even more soundless than Gran's, to lead them to the kitchen.

Behind the elf, in the doorway to the front room, a dim outline, backlit in snowlight.

Not Gran, but Draco. She'd forgotten… no, hadn't thought, that he was living in the same house. They'd even talked about him at breakfast, but she'd forgotten.

His face is nearly expressionless, grey eyes fixed on her, and then on Neville. Well, it wouldn't be too hard to puzzle out the state of affairs given that they're holding hands. She feels Neville shiver next to her. That would be a conversation for later, she supposes.

Draco nods to them, with an expression about his mouth that might be the shadow of an ironic smile. Then he turns to sit by the window, book in hand. He opens the book, and she sees a flash of his face in the mirror. The expression is quite different: stony desolation.

Neville sees it too, for he gulps, with a stricken look on his face.

Gran meets them at the doorway of the kitchen. "They'll be expecting you at Grimmauld Place," she says. "Lunch, Percy Weasley says." She looks at her watch with some satisfaction. "You'll be just about on time, I should think."

Hermione frowns.

"I told them you were in conversation, and I wouldn't presume to interrupt." She says, "It won't do to be late. Now, off with you both and I'll see you for supper."

When they step through the cold green flames into the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, Percy Weasley is just finishing chopping onions and potatoes, the Muggle way it would appear, and Andromeda Tonks is standing at the old-fashioned stove cooking something that smells delicious.

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Boxing Day, midnight**

We were expected downstairs, Gran had written on that parchment, _when we were quite finished_. Of course she knew what we had gotten up to; portraits talk, and if I read it correctly, Emily was a fast girl in her day. Neville was blushing furiously. It was remarkable, actually, how much of the body a blush could cover. He reached for his shirt and started buttoning frantically and clumsily, until I pointed out that it was inside out, and buttoned crookedly into the bargain.

I leaned over and kissed him on the shoulder. "Brazen it out," I said.

"Don't do that," he said. "We don't have time for a fourth go."

Then I laughed, because there were all sorts of things I hadn't suspected about Neville. I should have known better, given his Gran's robust views on any number of subjects.

It turned out that Gran was only passing on the summons from Andromeda Tonks, on behalf of the committee at Grimmauld Place. Andromeda inquired, actually, some time around ten or eleven o'clock, and Gran had told her that Neville and I were _in conversation_, a conversation that she wouldn't presume to interrupt.

Gran retailed all this with an expression that overshot smugness to land somewhere in the vicinity of _cat that ate the canary_. Neville was looking at her with puzzlement and calculation. There was no question but that she'd had plans, and that all was proceeding according to plan, perhaps in excess of expectations.

She told us that the committee would be meeting for a late lunch, at Grimmauld Place. One o'clock, by Andromeda's estimation. Then her face hardened into its usual grim limes. "An ugly business," she said.

The postwar is like that, I think. There are the bright spots—that lovely interlude upstairs, with the snow-light showing through the screen of leaves—and then there is the usual darkness.

The front room was sunk in afternoon gloom, and at first he was backlit. All I remember is pale eyes in a stricken white face, just a glimpse, as we passed the doorway. He was staring at me, and at Neville. He knew. Of course, how could he miss it? We were holding hands.

The look of pain vanished immediately behind the mask of the Prince in Exile, but not soon enough. Neville flinched; he had seen it as well.

He'd been importuning both of us, and now… it was plain that the game was up.

ooo

The conference at Grimmauld Place was actually a relief after that. The luncheon was delicious, a fry-up as plentiful and substantial as anything that Augusta Longbottom would have put out for us. Percy and Andromeda had been finishing it, just as we stepped through the Floo. Or rather, Neville stepped through first, and then helped me to step through. The archway of the hearth at Grimmauld Place is much narrower than that at Longbottom House, which is properly cavernous.

I saw a slight smile on Percy's face at that gesture, and an exchange of glances with Andromeda, whose expression remained properly neutral.

We were joined by Dean and Luna, who had been visiting Dean's mother and sisters for Boxing Day. Luna smiled at me and said that it had been far too long since she'd seen me last, but she hoped we'd see more of each other now that she was in London. From that I gathered that they'd be taking up permanent residence at Grimmauld Place. Xeno will be staying behind at the Burrow, to oversee the reconstruction of the Lovegoods' tower.

Percy delivered the bad news in brisk tones: the traces in the tumblers and the bottle indicated very high-grade Amortentia.

As the others arrived, we fell to discussing the legal implications, or rather, Percy explained them to me and to Dean, the outsiders in this circle. It's a family matter, not at all a business for the courts. Oh yes, and what I hadn't known: Pureblood marriage contracts traditionally mention both Imperius and love potions… by way of forbidding them.

I confess I wasn't as blasé as I might have been; I saw Andromeda Tonks flinch when I referred to Purebloods as 'those people'… in any case, someone in that house tampered with Ginny. Not with Harry; at Percy's insistence, Slughorn and Derwent both had examined him.

They fell to discussing who in the house had done it; Molly, of course, is more than a suspect, but Dean pointed out that we hadn't any evidence for certain. I added that Pureblood society seemed to have a way of rushing to judgment, pace Sirius Black, and perhaps a bit of attention to the laws of evidence wouldn't be amiss.

Then there was the discussion of dueling. It turns out that it's complicated to call out a member of one's own family. Percy didn't specify, but it was plain that he was contemplating such a challenge.

Andromeda Tonks said that she had a separate grievance.

Well, let me be more specific. As soon as Yule is over, it's likely that she's going to be demanding satisfaction from Molly Weasley in the matter of her daughter. It took me a minute to realize that she meant her _own_ daughter, not Ginny Weasley.

And then Neville offered to be her second, because not only had his friend Ginny been interfered with, but _his own, heart of his heart_.

Everyone in the room turned to stare at him, and then at me.

Dean and Luna recalled the remark that I'd made to Molly after the weather-working incident in October, refusing her offer of tea and biscuits with the question if that was the spread she'd put out for Tonks. Not so much what I'd said, which frankly was a shot in the dark, but Molly's reaction.

And Percy said with grim satisfaction that Heads of Family had done worse than Amortentia in the name of the Line, that it everyone was obsessed with the magical power of their descendants. Apparently that incident really had given me cachet as a potential daughter-in-law.

Lavender giggled again about the picture of me and Draco in the _Prophet_. "He was staking a claim," she said. She still found it funny, though she'd narrowed her eyes when I repeated what Molly had said, asking about my intentions toward Ron. Apparently, she and Ron were already involved at that time. She'd already heard how Molly received the news of her pregnancy.

But she giggled at the idea of Draco suddenly finding me fanciable because I was a force of nature.

"The finest breeding stock in wizarding Britain. It's only logical you should marry me." Which I remembered in Draco Malfoy's annoying drawl, except it hadn't been him (not least because I'd told him the subject was off limits), of course, but his great-grandfather the follower of Grindelwald, to young Miss Chattox.

Neville looked at me with chagrin at mention of Draco. The subject would be broached later, of course.

Ginny is coming home in three or four days – an impressively long stay in St. Mungo's, but that's Amortentia. They are already planning the recovery: to bring her back to her real loves, which fortunately are many. Luna and Dean will be taking her on a jaunt to Muggle London, to the galleries, and to meet Dean's little sisters.

We'll be mustering in this same kitchen to see her home. I thought about Madam Rosmerta, who reckoned my referral for treatment of Imperius as a life-debt, and how like Amortentia was to that Unforgivable Curse. How I'd counted myself fortunate to have been subjected to Cruciatus instead, even if it were at the hands of Bellatrix.

Yes, I'll be there to see Ginny. So will Neville, and Dean, and Luna, and Harry.

We talked into the afternoon. The leaders were Percy and Andromeda, both of whom had that brisk practical manner. As the afternoon wore on, Andromeda looked less and less like Bellatrix and more like my mother. A practical-minded rebel, is Andromeda, and nonetheless a Pureblood witch, with all that implies.

It's forbidden to duel, or to issue a challenge, during Yule, all the way to the threshold of the New Year. So I understand, from their comments; and while she turned down Neville's offer to stand as her second, it was in favor of some unnamed Slytherin Old Girl. Neville smiled at that, and the smile made him look very like Gran for a moment, in spite of his round pleasant features. I have my suspicions as to the identity of Andromeda's second, given who was the Hogwarts dueling champion of her day.

At the end of the conference, Percy took me aside, and told me that Slughorn had been much impressed with the spellwork that had captured the evidence. So, he asked, who'd taught me that spell? It's not in the Hogwarts curriculum…

I hesitated, and then said it had been Malfoy. Percy looked at me, and paused judiciously before he said, "Well. In any case… debts are owed. Though I wouldn't have expected…"

"He wasn't thinking of Ginny," I said. "But no knowledge is useless."

And then I remembered the look Draco had given us both, me and Neville, as we descended the stairs.

ooo

Draco came down to dinner arrayed in his dress robes with the green and silver embroidery on the collar and cuffs, the very same ones he had worn at Halloween. I thought at first that it might simply be a choice in honor of the holiday.

He was seated across from me, and he kept looking up at me, with his pale eyes and his mouth set in a thin line. By candlelight I noticed how the irises caught the light—only optics, I reminded myself. His long pale hands gleamed like bone. He's thinner than he was a few months back, probably as thin as he'd been when I weighted myself in his skin back in October.

For the most part his expression was neutral, bordering on demure, and then there was one moment when Neville passed me a dish and his fingertips brushed mine; I looked up to see Draco glaring at both of us.

And then, very deliberately, he fingered the top fastening on his robe … and undid it, to lay bare the hollow at the base of his throat: to remind me, I suppose, that I'd done that, and more, with my own hands not two months ago in his timeline…

Or maybe he was just feeling heated, but I much doubted that, not in Longbottom House, where I felt a perpetual chill since autumn, and it was far from warm even in the summer months.

I wished I could be elsewhere. Draco stared at me and Neville, and it felt like a silent interrogation. Neville felt constrained as well, and of course it was out of the question to discuss what had befallen Ginny. We already had exhausted the weather as a topic of conversation. The table fell silent, and we concentrated on dispatching the meal. Gran frowned, but there was nothing she could do to encourage conversation, and if she wasn't going to tolerate loose talk from her younger cousins in the Ministry (as Neville told me she'd done at Christmas dinner), she certainly wasn't going to discuss Ginny's condition or Andromeda's upcoming duel in front of Draco.

As we finished the meal, I said that I ought to be going back to Hogwarts. Gran shook her head, and said that she would send my regrets to the Headmistress. She nodded to Draco as he stood and bowed to her and then left the room.

Then she said to me, "There are some matters for us to discuss. I think it best you stay the night."

She showed me to a guest room, well-appointed with its own writing-desk and the library just down the hall, and then we returned to the front room. The message was plain: she wasn't delegating it to the house-elf.

All the while, I was thinking about the books and notes at home, and thinking that if I could just slip out to the terrace, I could Apparate back to my parents' house and get in a few hours of work on the Dementor-banishing project before Gran's conference. Really, it's more a matter of working out some details at this point; the main lines of the matter have become clear, although I have some questions for the more experienced members of our consortium. There are still details buried in the Department of Mysteries, I'm sure, but putting what we know on this side of the Channel with the Continental literature has set off some cascades of insight. Better even if we get another chance to talk with the North Americans, who I suspect know even different things.

Gran looked at me and said she would see me in her study in an hour. I nodded.

As soon as she left, I turned to go to the terrace, and Neville took my arm. "We should talk," he said.

I hadn't expected to be walking that way with a companion, and with him holding my arm, it was going to be a matter of Side-Along (not at all what I meant) or somehow evading him, which seemed unlikely. Neville is nothing if not dogged when set on something, and he was _paying attention_.

Which could be quite delightful in other circumstances, but was disturbing me just now.

He cast a warming charm on both of us before opening the doors to the terrace. I saw the fine snow still sifting down, and added an _Impervius_ to that.

He said to me, "You saw Draco at dinner."

I nodded, not missing the use of the given name, and saw Neville square his shoulders and swallow hard, the way he always has done by way of preparation for owning up to something unpleasant. Ever since he was a little boy… I remember that very look on him when he confessed to losing the passwords to the Gryffindor dormitory when Sirius Black was at large.

"I said I wasn't … having to do with him. That way. Except … I never did really break it off. He talked to me in November. Asked if I would … just for a while, before they sent him to Azkaban. That it wasn't too much to ask, was it? So I said, only what I could do."

I nodded, having a good idea of what he _couldn't_ do, which was what Draco had asked of me.

"He thinks I've lied to him."

I said, "So did he follow up?"

"No, not then. Only recently. Since he's been in this house."

I said, "All right then." I stared out into the snowy darkness. This probably didn't cast me in the most advantageous light. "The reason he didn't approach you was that he got what he wanted from me." I felt the bitter night air, just on the other side of the warming charm, and Neville's warmth next to me. I stared into the snowy darkness. "And I didn't exactly break it off, either. I didn't think it was something to break off, exactly. Except it turns out he thought it was… something." Even in the dim light from the French doors, I could tell from Neville's face that he was torn between curiosity and the disinclination to ask for details.

I said, "So what is it that you thought you _could_ do?" It came out sounding accusatory, at least to my ears, and I added, "I know what you couldn't do, and I don't know what possessed him to ask." I could feel myself squaring my shoulders, and hoped I wouldn't regret telling him the truth, or part of it. "He's taking his life in his hands to play those games with us. Either of us, but particularly you. I came within inches…" His eyes were on me now. "I didn't hurt him, I mean worse than he'd asked for, but I scared him badly. And I _wanted_ to do much worse." I remembered, much too vividly, what it was like to feel that banked fury, in Neville's skin, and the urges I'd felt toward Draco: to choke him, burn him alive, and then I remembered the slow-burning hatred I'd felt, staring at the Mark on his forearm. Yes, Neville judged his own dangerous impulses quite accurately; I'd failed to judge mine so. I took much too seriously my friends' caricature of me as always reasonable and a little cold.

Neville was silent for a while, and then he said, "Remember when you almost killed him in the hospital wing?" I did, now that he reminded me, but that was so long ago… two years, actually. I hadn't had a flare of wild magic in months, actually. Not since those assignations with Draco, not since I'd started work on the project of Banishing the Dementors. He continued, "There's a difference between feeling murderous and doing the deed." I remembered Harry's confession of untoward feelings, and what I'd said to him then. I nodded.

"What I told him I _could_ do … and that's before I knew you were interested … " The look of distress on his face was plain.

I said, "It wasn't lack of interest. It was … that misunderstanding. Because you hadn't told me I was on the list, and I've gotten all sorts of messages in the postwar, that blood status still meant something. And I was angry." I said, "I wouldn't have gotten involved with Draco either, except that I didn't think you were interested, and" – my face heated as I realized how true it was – "he dared me."

To my surprise, Neville laughed. "He dared you?"

"He said I had a reputation for collecting Quidditch players. And Purebloods."

Neville surprised me again; it was curiosity, not jealousy, that lit his eyes. "Hermione the _femme fatale_. So he took Rita's line, did he? So what did you tell him?"

"That if that were so, he'd be the crown jewel of the collection." I added, feeling stupid, "And that _he_ had a reputation for very narrow tastes, but he could do something about it." Neville laughed aloud. "I really don't know why I said that, except he'd just knocked me out of the sky and almost gotten himself killed by the Auror, and I was yelling at him about it…"

"Adrenalin," Neville said, "a very reliable aphrodisiac. Just a hair short of Amortentia for power, though less predictable. That's what Derwent told me." He put his arms around me, and said with a sigh, "You're relieved to be alive, and it feels like being in love."

I said, "Ginny, and Hannah." He nodded.

"They both were thinking of someone else, and I knew it. Because _I_ was thinking of someone else, or trying not to. That's how Draco happened, too." I watched his face. "I was holding him, and thinking about what it would be like to hold you." He looked embarrassed. "And then he starting provoking me, and I got angry enough… to make a move on him. Not gently. Because I don't like being played about, and it was Draco." I nodded. I understood that part, altogether too well. "He lives to stir up trouble, and he thinks the whole world revolves around him. And he wants someone to hold him and protect him from the consequences."

It was then I started laughing at the sheer absurdity of it. "So we're both standing in for Narcissa Malfoy. Though that's beyond disturbing…"

Neville said, "He's scared, and he's looking at life in Azkaban. He told me once… he's never been able to summon a Patronus. He'd tried, when he still could do magic. He knew the theory, but he couldn't manage it. That was another thing he hated Harry for."

I said, "And from his point of view, we _did_ lie to him. By omission, at least." I added, "After that business with the photo in the _Prophet_... well, he said to me that he knew that I was in love with you. And he left me little doubt about what he'd been doing with you." I shivered a little at the memory.

"He was jealous of you, at least back in July. That's why he gave me the hair clasp. He saw the present you'd given me, and had to outdo you." Neville looked at me. "Which he certainly did, if you reckon the matter in galleons." He smiled. "Which I don't."

He added that he cherished that birthday gift from me, because it was so plainly meant for him and no one else. Then he pulled me close and kissed me again, and whispered in my ear that he loved being able to do this, that things were out in the open. That everyone knew, and seemed glad of it. Lavender had positively beamed at him.

He said, "She was right, you know." I frowned. "Tonks. When she said it was better to hold out for something real, than to settle for an _arrangement_." He said, "I finally understood, this afternoon, after what Madam Tonks said. It really wasn't personal. She fancied girls. She actually said as much at the time, but I didn't understand." He smiled a little. "Of course, she was flustered that I'd overheard, so she didn't make a lot of sense."

His first kiss was from someone who didn't fancy him, but cared for his feelings, however clumsily. One could do worse.

"So," I said, "what are we going to do about Draco?"

"Talk to him, I suppose." I nodded, and we went inside. Fifteen minutes remained, before Gran expected me in her study. We walked through the downstairs rooms; Draco was nowhere in evidence. The elf materialized out of the darkness, and Neville asked it where Draco had gone. It pointed up the stairs.

There was a line of light under his closed door. I knocked, but there was no answer.

ooo

Gran closed the door of her study and indicated that I should sit down. There was a chair by the tiny fireplace, and I took it. She sat down, summoned the decanter of Firewhiskey, and poured out a finger or two in heavy crystal tumblers. Not enough to get drunk, only the ritual libation among adults settling down to dire business.

She waited for me to take a first measured sip and to feel the flare in my sinuses. "I've spoken to Bill Weasley. Or rather, I've been sent in his direction. Griphook means this business to succeed, and he knows me for your sponsor." I looked at her. "Galtier saw none of our elders at that meeting, and she had words with O'Halloran. It's a condition of their participation that we show we're in earnest."

I frowned, remembering what I'd glimpsed by wandlight of the North American's dark hair and stolid face. I'd reckoned her in her mid-to-late forties. "How old is she?"

"Born with the century, like Williams and Gonzalez. They only tolerate a youngster like Maggie O'Halloran, because she's too well-connected to ignore."

Gran looked at me, and I must have looked puzzled enough, so before I could get the questions out of my mouth, she was answering them.

Apparently North America _is_ different, because as I understood it, Sinead Pierce O'Halloran was of an age with Minerva McGonagall and Boudicca Derwent. But then the wizarding world in North America hasn't been riven by wars on the model of Grindelwald and Voldemort, having had other fish to fry. It's only been of late that the soi-disant Purebloods of the European settlement have taken up the notion, and it's reckoned to be political, as O'Halloran would be classified as a Half-blood under the blood-status guidelines of the Thicknesse Ministry.

As for her nom de guerre of Maggie, her full name is Sinead Margaret Mary Bridget Pierce O'Halloran, as it happens. She went by Maggie at school at Salem Academy. I suppose that all of Nature's nobility find the need to do homage to as many ancestors as possible in naming their offspring… because there are few enough offspring, and quite a few ancestors to placate.

ooo

After the conference with Gran, Neville was waiting for me, much in the manner of a bodyguard. I said, "You aren't letting me go, are you?"

"Gran thought you should stay the night here and rest up."

"But I have messages to pick up at home." He looked at me for a minute, and then said, "You mean… not at Hogwarts."

"No, not at Hogwarts. Telephone messages."

"We have a phone here." So much for that gambit.

So I found myself sitting in Augusta Longbottom's study using the relatively less ancient of the two telephones in the house, and picking up the messages on the answering machine at my parents' house.

There were only one or two, and only one that mattered, the one from Nigel. "You've got an invitation for New Year's Eve," he said, "and just to be fair so do your workmates."

He's turned it about somehow made it official. In any case, I see no way to wriggle out of the invitation.

New Year's Eve. There's the Ministry ball that night, as well. I'd skip both if I could get away with it, but of course I can't. No, I would like nothing so much as a quiet evening at home, preferably with my newly acquired Dark Arts library, but that won't do, because there's politicking to be done.

So Nigel's wangled an invitation for all of my workmates… to a party that was to have been _most exclusive. _Well, I will just have to locate them and stick to them like a burr.

I'll stop by my parents' house tomorrow to pick up the post, since it's clear that I won't be allowed out of Longbottom House without a good night's sleep, more's the pity.

That New Year's party … I'm quite sure that there won't be a question of bringing a boyfriend along, not for what Nigel has in mind. It's quite clear what sort of game he's playing. I will have to sort it eventually, though I'm not sure how. That last little hint about how contingent my job might be… well, it's that sort of thing that makes me feel some temptation to Muggle-baiting. No, not baiting: just a quick jolt of power to show him who's who, because in the absence of that he outweighs me a thousandfold.

No, I won't think about this just now.

There is that good night's sleep to get, after all.

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**30 December 1998**

Draco had been watching, Neville said, and not only after the fact. He'd seen us embracing in the doorway on Boxing Day. Neville had caught just a glimpse, a flash of hurt in that pale inimical mask, and then when he looked again, Draco was gone. And then (he said with a smile) there had been other things to absorb his attention.

I see Draco now, dogging our footsteps without admitting that's what he's about, and staring. Finally, today, I confronted him. He raised his hand to me, in what might have been the beginning of a gesture or a threat. I found my hand closed around his wrist. Before I knew what I was doing, I had seized both his wrists. He looked at me with heavy-lidded languor and smiled. My hostility excites him, and so he provokes me, thinking that he'll get a repetition of what happened before.

It's more than disturbing, and only some of that is my bad conscience. Neville says that Draco has given him reproachful looks when he's with me, and looked downcast when he caught him alone. Plainly he means to play us off against each other, and take each of us on our unguarded side: Neville's compassion, and my fury.

And we did lie to him, if nothing else by omission. He didn't ask for undying devotion, only for an interlude in his few months left in the sunlight. By summer if not by spring, they'll send him to the dark fortress in the North Sea, and whatever the weather outside, he won't see it. I've been inside those walls and I know what he'll see: darkness, and the cold brush of the soul-eating wraiths.

ooo

**Author's note:** Draco's inability to summon a Patronus is attributed to J. K. Rowling by a correspondent of mine, though I don't have a citation for the interview.


	58. Chapter 58

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**New Year's Eve 1998, two o'clock in the afternoon**

What a day it's been. Just a moment I'm stealing to sort it out. I've been puzzling over the clothes to wear, and the things to carry. I have the Ministry ball to attend, and serious politicking to do there. There's Arthur Weasley and Professor Slughorn and, yes, Augusta Longbottom will be there with Xeno Lovegood, and in general there will be a show of force from the Remus Lupin Foundation and its supporters.

The _Prophet_ has been printing teasers all week about the shocking revelations to be made, and the exclusive to be printed shortly after the New Year, along with the indictments for the trial. I know the dates for those, of course, as well as the full content, not that I can speak of that to anyone else. Fidelius keeps my silence for me.

I keep remembering Augusta Longbottom's observation that being Minister was an overrated honor. I've seen Kingsley Shacklebolt more than once in passing in the last week, and he's aged since I saw him at the end of the war. Aged, as all men and women of state age, knowing and not being able to tell… I wonder at the motives of the Wizengamot in appointing him.

Augusta Longbottom has asked me some rather pointed questions about my unofficial experience with magical perimeter defenses. I rather gave myself away with the blood-homunculi, I think. No, that's an understatement: Madam Longbottom probably has suspected for some time.

"It's Madam and not Mrs.," Draco corrected me, with his characteristic sneer at my plebeian ways. She's a Power not to be trifled with… unspoken of course, _and so are you_. Everything's double-edged with him, though I think at the moment I annoy him more than he annoys me.

We'll leave out of it his attempts at seduction. Neville and I took a walk this afternoon and had a family conference about the question: well, at the third mile, once we'd walked side by side in silence and gotten the tense atmosphere of the house dissipated in the cold air… and three miles out felt sufficiently far _out of earshot_ that we could speak freely.

The problem is that we both feel guilty about reneging on a promise. It's rather unfair to say, "well, it doesn't count given whom we promised," because once you set off down that path, it's dodgy and we both know it.

The more disturbing thing was that we fell to talking about him, well, what we'd done, or what he'd done (put his mouth to useful purpose for once)… oh, dear. Because to be honest we had to admit that he was rather good at it, and there was something weirdly arousing about that conversation, and when we got home we made tea, and couldn't keep our hands off each other (not helped by the fact that there are no family portraits in the kitchen). Andromeda Tonks arrived, luckily before we'd gotten too far out of hand, but I could tell from the look on her face that she could see… because she very pointedly turned her glance aside.

Oh yes, and Percy was already in conference with Augusta when we arrived. We walked past the closed door of the study and Neville whispered that we should be discreet… I heard voices on the other side of the door. Of course, we didn't linger to eavesdrop, because we were already on our way upstairs for another hands-on demonstration before we dressed for the Ministry ball.

No, I'm not writing about that, though it was rather a lot of fun. Neville is very much more playful in bed than I would have expected, and I walk around now thinking that I have charge of one of the best-kept secrets in wizarding Britain…

Back to the matter at hand. I'll be at the Ministry ball for the evening, though at some point I'm going to have to slip away and Apparate back to my parents' house to do the time loop and then Apparite back to the New Year's party to which Nigel invited me and my workmates. I still haven't decided the question of what to wear to that one… I should be festive but not encouraging. Something austere and professional… and _warm_. I won't be able to cast warming charms there. I'll put in an appearance, chat with my workmates, greet our nominal host, and then slip out for a breath of fresh air and disappear. I've scouted the location; unfortunately, there are far too many cameras in the vicinity. There's one blind spot, I think, but it will require a block's walk in the cold to reach. That's where I'll arrive and leave.

It should be simple… well, provided I can avoid Nigel. I don't like this, of course; it feels just like Slughorn's Christmas party in sixth year, though I didn't saddle myself with Nigel the way I did with McLaggen. No, this time it's some ways worse: he decided all by himself, he's deadly persistent, and he's a Muggle, which has so much potential for complication that I don't even want to think about it.

If I'm clever about it, nothing should happen.

On the other hand, the world turns out to be perilously small: I chanced to look at the list of bank directors and I saw a surname I know all too well. Finch-Fletchley. It's probably not coincidence, either. Father or uncle or cousin, I'm not sure, but Justin fits the profile in any case. Very much my social betters, yes.

Speaking of whom, Justin won't be at the Ministry ball except briefly; this is his rotation on-call at St. Mungo's for the duration of the full moon. The new protocol is firmly in place. Ron is on duty with the Aurors, since they're on alert around the holiday in case of a demonstration from the as-yet-unpacified enemy. The one they've been stirring up, never mind, with the extrajudicial score-settling… He won't be on patrol, only minding the shop up in Magical Law Enforcement. They're letting the trainees attend the ball in shifts, given that most of them are Defense Association veterans and it wouldn't do to have them absent.

The whole thing is absurd. The war isn't by any means over, but all persons official are pretending that it is. A phony peace is nearly as tense as a phony war.

Enough for now. It's time to dress for the Ministry ball, and to make sure of everything I'll need for the evening.

ooo

There was a flash of memory of Halloween, when there had been a similar celebration… well, no this time she was setting off from Longbottom House, with a rather longer itinerary ahead of her. Augusta was looking at her with an expression that was only a hair short of _proprietary_, and Neville had her arm tucked nicely through his, and he was patting her hand, and beaming every time she looked at him.

There was no question to whom the first dance belonged, just as soon as there was one to which she knew the steps.

They arrived at the ball early, just as the orchestra was setting up. Neville was still beaming at her and at one point he put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. Well, yes, no one was looking, but really… The touch did remind her of what they'd done that afternoon, and of course the promise of what might happen once they'd crossed midnight and gone home.

It was going to be a very long night before they got to the good part.

ooo

The ball opened with a brief speech by the Minister, wishing them all a good time in the celebration of the closing of a year that had brought immeasurable change to the wizarding world. Some of the heroes of that business were present—among whom he might mention Hermione Granger and Neville Longbottom—and others were to arrive later, as their duties permitted. Hermione was taken aback to be singled out.

Then the orchestra struck up the first tune: a stately minuet. And to her surprise, Horace Slughorn approached her for the first dance, alongside Madam Marchbanks and the Minister. No doubt her alarm showed on her face, for Professor Slughorn said in a low voice, "The steps are quite simple, Miss Granger. Follow my lead."

Swallowing her anxiety, she did so. For the first few measures, all her attention was occupied in following the steps: not too fast, a pace appropriate to those of advanced years who might find themselves encumbered by the trappings of eighteenth-century aristocratic costume; in wizarding robes, they were actually quite simple indeed. Slughorn was wearing his emerald-green velvet robes with the silver embroidery, and smiling at her in an encouraging way. Down the file of dancers she saw Boudicca Derwent, in the festive forest-green robes with the oak-leaf pattern, and Minerva McGonagall, in deep scarlet with stylized Scottish thistles, and a score of others of the generation of the 1940s. Perhaps they'd all learned the minuet and the quadrille at school. She supposed that things changed slowly enough in this world that it might be so; she wondered what steps Horace Slughorn himself had learned at school. His teachers would have been young at the time of the French Revolution.

She glanced uneasily to the edge of the ballroom; Neville and his grandmother were gone, but Arthur Weasley was standing there, and next to him Fleur, and both of them were smiling at her.

_Well,_ she thought, _likely he's not the poisoner, if he's smiling at me._

Unlike the last time, there was no political conversation; she knew, however, that to be invited for the first dance probably did send a political signal. As the dance ended, Madam Marchbanks inclined her head in a brief acknowledging bow. Derwent smiled at her, very briefly.

She excused herself, and Neville was at her side once more, bringing her a cup of punch and following her over to talk to Fleur. As the dance music struck up once more, this time a quadrille, Fleur patted the chair next to her. "Sit down, cherie. You needn't dance every measure. The good professor has made his claim already." The silvery glow was more pronounced than last time, and Hermione found herself relaxing, thinking that yes, it was going to be a long night, but in such company it would be pleasant. Fleur added that Bill wouldn't be home until moonset, which was a pity, but St. Mungo's had to be covered… in case.

Arthur Weasley thanked her for the draft report on sentient magical beings, which had made its way to his desk. Oh yes, and he'd sent a copy on to Perdita Bennigsen-Bagshot at the Swedish Institute, and she could expect to receive by Owl the latest edition of Bennigsen-Bagshot's work on werewolf pack structure. Apparently this secret report was anything but secret; it was getting a wide circulation amongst the supporters of the Remus Lupin Foundation.

He added, "She commented that your chapter on the Dementors was _most interesting._" Hermione felt a brief thrill of alarm. She didn't really remember that part, but that had been the beginning of the correspondence with Andrei Karkaroff. It seemed a very long time ago…

The band was striking up the fox-trot now; it was the generational changing of the guard. Augusta Longbottom and Horace Slughorn were the first couple to take the floor, and Arthur invited her to dance. She shook her head. "I don't know the steps," she said.

"Oh, you're a clever girl; you'll manage," he said. And without pause, they joined the others on the dance floor. Hermione hadn't told the entire truth; she'd learned them a very long time ago, and had danced this with her grandfather, once. It had been an old dance when he was young…

But then she mis-stepped in earnest, and laughed in sheer nervousness, because Percy Weasley had tapped Horace Slughorn on the shoulder… to cut in. She wasn't the only one staring; there was a sort of general pause. Augusta looked at Percy, as if taking his measure, and then nodded, and accepted his arm.

"Oh my," said Arthur. She wasn't going to ask if he were in on it. No. This was not something that she was going to ask about, already knowing more than she wanted to…

She whispered, "What do you think Rita's going to make of it?"

Arthur said, "Nothing." Indeed, there had been no flash, which rather surprised Hermione. Arthur explained that there were people with whom you trifled at your peril, and Rita Skeeter was street-fighter and Pureblood enough to know that roster forward and back.

ooo

That was not the end of the scandal, either; not half an hour later, Hermione, sitting around the table with Xeno Lovegood, Arthur Weasley, and Augusta Longbottom, saw Percy Weasley approach the leader of the orchestra and confer with him in a whisper. Neville, next to her, saw as well and began to laugh. Hermione looked at him in puzzlement.

"Percy has been doing some extra tutorial in Muggle Studies," Neville whispered, as the orchestra struck up… a jitterbug.

Hermione thought that she had come to the end of the eccentricity of witches and wizards, but there was one chapter more: Percy and Augusta dancing, and odd and unlikely couples alongside them: Derwent and McGonagall, Shacklebolt and Sprout. Horace Slughorn gamely gave it a try, but sat down again, his face red.

The expression on Percy's face as he twirled his partner was _smug._

Neville was laughing. "Oh, I didn't know the lad had it in him," he said. "Oh _my._" He shook his head, and put his arm around Hermione.

"You _encouraged _him," she said.

"Why not? It's the end of the war. She ought to have a bit of fun." More seriously, he added, "It's been ten years since my granddad died. No one would accuse her of impropriety." He said, "He wouldn't have wanted her to wither away. He always said she had life enough in her for a good three lifetimes." He blinked, and fumbled in his robes for his handkerchief.

"Oh Neville," she said, as he dabbed at his eyes. "I'm not disapproving. I just… don't understand, I think."

He said, "It's a long story."

ooo

The jitterbug broke up with a great deal of laughter, which set the tone for the rest of the ball. Even the elders got onto the dance floor for the dance before midnight, which was a wild circle dance like the one they'd all danced together at the Halloween ball. No one pretended to know all the steps; she saw Seamus and Parvati giggling, and Dean and Luna, and more than a few of the others from the Defense Association, along with Arthur and Xeno. Percy and Augusta were in the circle, too (and since when had it been _Percy and Augusta?_) It felt more like a mad carnival than New Year's Eve, and as the dance broke up, just as midnight struck, the dancers huzzahed and threw their hats into the air. Neville caught her in his arms and dipped her backward and kissed her on the chin, and she couldn't help but laugh. Everyone was shouting, "Happy New Year!" and congratulating each other in a joyous hubbub.

And then she remembered … the other party.

In the hubbub, it was easy to excuse herself and slip off to one of the little rooms off the main ballroom, which she promptly locked behind her, and cast _Muffliato_ into the bargain, before Apparating to her parents' house.

Her clothes for the other party were laid out: the black tunic and a narrow black skirt, inconspicuous and modest… and not too frivolous shoes, though she was fairly sure she didn't want to be in those heels all night. It was only going to be an hour. She could stand anything for an hour. Her wand would be in its sleeve holster, the blue beaded bag at her wrist… She looked at the clock in the hallway, and turned the hourglass the requisite number of turns. Yes. An hour before midnight.

Wand in hand, she turned in the foyer, focused on her destination, and felt the whip and twist of space around her as she winked into darkness and reappeared in the shadows. Yes. A good thing she'd done her reconnaissance. She cast a discreet warming charm and set off on the block-long walk.

ooo

The party was well underway by the time she got there; she'd warned her workmates that she'd be coming late, and there was another engagement to which she'd been invited the same night… She found them without difficulty, as they'd placed themselves well in the way of the trays emerging from the kitchen. Programmers and food, yes. "You don't get the magic without feeding the wizards," said her workmate who had Dean's print on his wall. He pushed a plate full of savory appetizers her way. "Saved you some. Try the ones with the prawns… delicious."

She realized that she was hungry, and took the offered food. She was thirsty, too, but it looked a bit risky to go to the bar for a drink. There was Nigel Black, with two of his friends. Oh dear, and he spotted her, too, and was pointing her out to them. There were two of them, a tall thin blond and a shorter, broader redhead. The blond had a supercilious expression that put her in mind of Malfoy, that and the chill look: as if she were something not quite human and probably not even of scientific interest. Except that Malfoy—Draco, actually—didn't look at her that way anymore. The two men exchanged a look with each other, and with Nigel, and the blond cuffed him on the arm …

… well, she could guess the content of that conversation.

It was probably too soon to excuse herself and be within the bounds of politeness.

Or maybe it wasn't, given the look on his face. He'd had more than a few drinks, from the sway in his step as he pushed his way through the crowd, but his eyes were locked on her. No, this wasn't going to be pretty; his look was feral, and hostile. Clearly she'd arrived a little too late for his liking.

She was not going to hang about waiting for the trouble. Plainly it already had arrived: he'd been bragging to his friends about the girl he was going to get, and she was being shown off, and then it would be a point of honor for him to push things…

She stood up, and muttered something about needing to powder her nose, and slipped back out along the wall. In worst case, she could Apparate from the loo, if it came to that.

Yes, she'd Apparate home, and go back to the Ministry ball, and they could forget all of this. Yes. They could forget the whole thing, and she'd probably be out of a job, but that would just have to be taken as it came. It all put rather a lot more pressure on her for the Dementor-banishing project, but that was nothing new.

And then there was Augusta Longbottom's offer of an apprenticeship, which she was going to take up, on the condition that Augusta lend her a hand with pressuring the Ministry about her parents. Things had been let to drift for _far_ too long.

Then there was the hint that Neville had dropped, that Derwent might have a similar interest in her… well, fine if she had platonic suitors fighting for her favors. All to the good. It was the other kind for which she had no use.

There were things to be done, and rather an extensive set of revisions to make to her calendar for the coming year; she was quite sure that she hadn't added the visit to St. Mungo's to see Lavender after the NEWTs, nor the NEWTs themselves. Yes, and if she did well enough on the Potions NEWT, there might be work to be had with the Remus Lupin Foundation. Slughorn was going to be recruiting assistants, it seemed, and he'd dropped a rather strong hint to her in the mazes of the dance…

… she still smiled, thinking about Horace Slughorn gamely attempting the first steps of a jitterbug with his old friend Augusta, and giving up with a red face and rather winded. Augusta did keep in trim, compared to her old school friend. It was her relatively more austere tastes, she'd suppose. She can't remember seeing Neville's Gran indulge herself in sweets at table… yes, a finger or two of Firewhiskey after supper, but not chocolates or crystallized pineapple.

"Where did you think you were going?"

He was in front of her now – how? – and the route to the loo was cut off. Very well, then. No use now in pretending that's what she was about, and in his current mood she wouldn't be surprised if he followed her in there. She turned on her heel and made for the front doors of the hotel. He followed her out into the frigid night.

She'd recover her winter cloak from her blue beaded bag in good time, she supposed, or cast a warming charm, just as soon as she was out of range of the surveillance cameras.

"I'm sorry," she called over her shoulder. "I just got an urgent call. Not one that I can neglect, either."

"Your little art student, I suppose." Oh dear, yes, Nigel was under the misapprehension that she had a low taste for art students, among whom he numbered Draco, the presumptive boyfriend. Funny that Neville was invisible to him…

"I really don't have time for this," she said, and picked up her pace, as well as she could in the impractical shoes.

"Oh, yes you do. I've had enough of your evasion." Just outside the doors, facing the plaza, he caught her by the elbow and whirled her around.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

To her surprise, he pulled her in rather closer than she'd expect, and the grip on her arm tightened.

"You're going to come back inside with me, and you're going to look happy about it." He glimpsed up, yes, he was doing the same calculation as she, of the likely picture in the camera.

"I don't think so." Her wand was in her hand nearly as soon as she felt the spike of adrenalin. "I think you'd be very foolish to try to force me, either."

He narrowed his eyes. "I told you, I'm very much better connected than you might think. And I know people who know who you are. Schoolmates of yours." A shiver went through her. He pulled her even closer, so that she could feel his pulse through his ribs, not to mention what she didn't want to feel down below. "So don't think you can play games with me. We're going to come to an understanding."

How to get out of this… no, the grip on her left arm was too tight, and he was twisting it a bit, surreptitiously. Subtlety wasn't going to do it with this one.

She stomped on his foot and he cursed.

"Oh, you're going to regret that," he said, and grabbed her again.

That was the moment when she decided that the Statute of Secrecy could go hang, or rather, her reflexes decided it for her. It wasn't muscle but magic that threw him back ten paces or more, so that he staggered a bit and would have fallen except that the wall of the hotel was behind him.

Her wand was in her hand now, and raised, and she was in combat stance. In costume as a young lady of the financial district, but in the pose of a fully armed warrior, even if he didn't recognize the thing in her hand as a weapon.

His eyes narrowed. "Put down that silly thing and come with me. We aren't finished."

"Oh, you would be wrong," she says. "I really am _quite_ tired of this." She turned to face him, feeling her fury pushing at the bounds of good sense. "I have turned you down—how many times? How many times do I have to say 'no' before it takes?" He stared at her, face white and sharp in the winter moonlight, icy wind lifting his pale, fine hair. "I am _not your sort,_ so what is it you want?"

He stared at her, as if the answer ought to be self-evident.

She felt dizzy, couldn't believe she'd pulled out her wand—and she was threatening him with it—in the middle of the London financial district, under the eyes of the cameras.

"Let me tell you something that's _none of your business,_" she said, aware that she was showing teeth in a rictus that was not a smile. "I am so far from your sort that you can't begin to imagine it. And the hefty one, as you call him, _that's_ the boyfriend, and you're not likely to change that. Even as a diversion. _Especially_ as a diversion. Because what I do for diversion, is flying. And there's no way you can compete with _that._"

His eyes opened wide, and she realized simultaneously that she'd told the truth and that of course he's misread it—_flying_ in his world meant flying an aircraft.

He lunged forward to take her arm, rather roughly, and as she pushed him back she said, "I'm giving you to the count of ten, _Nigel Black…_" What would have happened next, had he persisted—didn't matter. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something shift in the shadow. Dark shapes separated from the shadows, an inkier shade of lunar penumbra, and then in the full moonlight…

There were six of them, no, seven, and one of them lunged at Nigel before she could react. The huge jaws opened, fangs glistening, and there was a fraction of a second in which she hesitated, before the reactions of the other world replaced the masquerade of this one… during which the jaws closed on Nigel's shoulder and he screamed, and she pointed her wand and shouted _"Stupefy!"_ taking out the werewolf in the lead, and then pivoted to repeat the stunning spell on its fellows.

Nigel was in shock, clasping his uninjured hand over his torn shoulder. In the dim light, she could see the gleam of white bone and raw bloody flesh, and blood soaking the shreds of his very expensive overcoat, jacket and shirt. _"Bloody fuck!" _he screamed, "what was that?"

She smelled the coppery reek of blood and the wind chilled it on her face, at the periphery of her attention. He was losing blood fast. She wasn't sure she should attempt anything more than a basic repair, given that the cursed wounds, but she cast a spell to stop the bleeding, though of course she was already spattered with it.

"Stand still," she said, and for once Nigel Black actually listened. She re-seated the dislocated bone, did a quick check for breakage—mercifully, none, although the muscles of the shoulder girdle were an ugly shredded mess—and then a quick field repair. The Healers would have to take it apart again, but for the time being Nigel had something like a functional shoulder joint, with the muscle and skin lightly knit together. She immobilized it—which to him would feel like paralysis—and he stared at her, mouth open in a scream with no soundtrack.

Then, before the stunning spell wore off, she whipped the wand through seven loops of _Incarcerus_ and bound the prostrate wolves.

They actually weren't very far from the Ministry here, and the damage was already done, so she flicked the wand again: "_Expecto patronum!" _

She dispatched the glimmering transparent otter to the Auror Department, to Ron Weasley. "Ron, get someone over here. Come yourself, if you can. Werewolf bite. A Muggle. And let Bill and Justin know, over at St. Mungo's." The apparition swam off through the glass wall behind them.

"What the fuck _are _you?" Nigel said, this time in a whisper. Shock was setting in, it would seem.

"Just as you guessed, Nigel," she said. "I have wizard friends, and I'm a witch." She smiled, feeling dizzy.

"But what are you _doing _here?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary," she said. "Trying to make a living."

ooo

The Aurors who Apparated into the plaza two minutes later didn't do anything for Nigel's sanity, she imagined: two senior officers in scarlet robes, wands drawn, and a trainee in black with scarlet facings—Ron Weasley.

"Well, there goes the Statute of Secrecy," Hermione said, having the mad and irresistible urge to giggle.

The older Auror shrugged and jerked his head to indicate Nigel. "Just a quick _Obliviate_ and we'll have that sorted." He raised his wand.

"Absolutely not," Hermione said, stepping in to shield Nigel. "We have a _serious _problem on our hands, and we'd better have someone on hand at St. Mungo's to Pensieve the witnesses. And I won't have clumsy field Obliviation mucking that up." She pointed above the doorway to the hotel. "And in any case we're being watched by the Muggles, and you lot just got yourself caught on camera."

The other Auror pointed her wand at the surveillance camera. "_Obliviate!"_

Hermione couldn't help it; she rolled her eyes. "It's not animate."

"_Reducto!"_ Well, she had to give them points for precision; the camera, and nothing else, shattered into shards and fell to the sidewalk.

"You'd best hope that isn't the kind that transmits…" she said, realizing that of course it probably was. The bank's surveillance system had just picked up something very strange before the camera went dead, something that the security people would be analyzing with fascination for days.

And there might well be a camera she hadn't seen…

In any case, she'd just been caught on camera as well, along with seven werewolves, her Patronus, and three members of the Auror Department. Oh yes, and the hapless Nigel Black, but he was the least of her worries just now, though this was all adding layers of awkwardness to the prospect of her next day at work.

Ron Weasley was watching the whole thing with a tense expression. "So, are we taking them to St. Mungo's?" he said, indicating the bound werewolves.

"That's the new protocol," the older Auror said, sounding not at all happy about it. "They're going to keep them under observation and then dose them with Wolfsbane next full moon. Seems like a waste to me, when we've got silver knives to take care of that sort of problem."

Ron said, "Look, I'm just the trainee, but I _know_ her. I won't be responsible if she takes it all the way to the Minister, and she will."

Hermione looked at him,and resisted the urge to tip him a wink. Instead, she continued to be firm with them: hospital first, then Obliviate, if deemed necessary by _qualified specialists. _ They'd need to call Boudicca Derwent at the Ministry ball, or someone similarly qualified to Pensieve a witness, because there was a problem, a serious one, aside from what they were seeing just now, and she wouldn't have clumsy field Obliviation messing with the evidence.

As expected—well, no, as _hoped_—they backed down.

Just to be certain, Hermione took Nigel's arm for the Side-Along Apparition to St. Mungo's, as Ron whispered confidentially, "Justin's waiting for us."

ooo

When they materialized in the Dangerous Creatures Department, Nigel doubled over, retching. The Healer on duty met them halfway, Vanished the mess, and said to Nigel, "You've been very brave, dear, and now we're going to take care of you."

The authoritative medical manner translated just fine across the barrier of the worlds, and Nigel visibly relaxed.

She had _so_ been looking forward to going home and falling asleep—which she supposed she could do, except that she was the only person here that Nigel knew. He was white from shock and loss of blood, and he kept looking from one Auror to another with a piteous expression of incomprehension, then fixing on her, presumably as the one familiar face.

The Healer's assistant came forward with the analgesic Potion, and Nigel obediently accepted the flask and drank, as the Healer cast a Cheering Charm, and then another one just to be safe.

In the midst of this, Ron was calm, chatty, and mildly curious as to how Hermione came to know the first Muggle bitten by a werewolf in central London within living memory. Nigel was now euphoric and somewhat giggly. "So he's a wizard, too?" he said, gesturing at Ron. "Another boyfriend?"

"School friend," Hermione said drily. "Old boys, you know." She wasn't going to spell it out further, because frankly it was none of his business. Ron was looking at him suspiciously.

He said, "Oh, is this the one that Dean was calling Draco Malfoy's Muggle cousin? Because I can really see the resemblance."

Hermione folded her arms and said, "There's more resemblance than meets the eye. Brothers under the skin, they are."

Nigel bridled at this, recognizing the name. "I have _nothing_ to do with that little ponce."

"Actually, we call him the ferret," Ron replied, relenting a little in evident approval of anyone, wizard or Muggle, who despised Draco Malfoy as much as he did, and then (apparently assuming that the Statue was moot, given that Nigel was likely to be Obliviated in short order), he told Nigel how Draco got his nickname.

When Justin walked in, Nigel started to laugh hysterically; Hermione assumed it was an excess of Cheering Charms.

Justin wrangled successfully with the Aurors over the question of Obliviation, pointing out that this was a Muggle who's been bitten by a werewolf, and it would be deucedly difficult to keep him on a regime of Wolfsbane Potion if he can't remember what happened, and in any case, _this was the new protocol._

The Healer stepped in and said that there would be no Obliviation at all until she'd had a consult with Healers Smethwyck and Derwent, and she would thank the Aurors to remember the protocol now in place.

Nigel was still staring at Justin. "Finch-Fletchley, isn't it."

Justin turned and his eyes widened. "Oh," he said, then immediately recovered himself. "Nigel Black, isn't it? Justin Finch-Fletchley. I believe we've met."

It was altogether too small a world, Hermione decided.

Nigel's brother was a year ahead of Justin's cousin at Eton; the ensuing conversation between Nigel and Justin, about people that Hermione had never met, seemed to calm Nigel somewhat, as well as to raise his estimate of all the rest of them, given that Hogwarts was the school for which Justin declined a place at Eton.

Nigel immediately went into Old Boy mode, trying to figure out the social relationships.

Justin explained that Hermione Granger was a decorated war hero, and they'd just come through a major wizarding war. He sketched the whole political situation in quick lines, including the part about Fenrir Greyback and his werewolf packs. And, well, what this place was—St. Mungo's—and why Justin was here, as the representative of the Remus Lupin Foundation, and how he was going to show Nigel the things he will need to adjust to life as a werewolf. But not to worry, because lycanthropy was now a treatable chronic condition.

Nigel said, "So I'm a werewolf now."

Justin nodded. "I'm sorry, yes."

"And you're a wizard." Justin nodded. Nigel indicated Hermione and Ron. "And he's a wizard. And she's a witch." Justin nodded. "And the chaps she was with…they were wizards too."

"Neville and Draco," Ron cut in. "Neville is one of ours, and Draco… well, he was on the other side."

"And she only dates wizards."

Justin said, "It's rather awkward otherwise, you know."

Nigel said, "Well, fuck me," and went off into hysterical giggling once more.

The Healer said, "Come this way." She dismissed the two senior Aurors. "You can go now. I believe we will be finishing around dawn, and it won't be worth your while to hang about waiting."

She turned to Hermione. "We'll be repairing the shoulder now, while there's still a hope of it." Nigel looked at her, terror cutting through the Cheering Charm. "I'm afraid we'll have to keep you conscious, dear." She looked pointedly at Hermione.

"I'll sit with him," she said.

The Healer Levitated Nigel into the operating room, with Hermione and Ron following by way of honor guard. Hermione mouthed at him, _You don't have to stay._ Ron shook his head and followed.

ooo

**Author's note:** Dear readers, my apologies for the delay in posting. Real life (job duties and illness following high season in March through May) has been altogether too much with us lately. I hope that things will relent somewhat this summer and permit the re-establishment of regular posting. Thank you for your patience.


	59. Chapter 59

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

The Healer has jet-black hair streaked with white and a tip-tilted nose; she looks familiar but I can't place those features. I know that I'm avoiding what's going on below her face, on the table. She looks back at me.

"Talk to him," she says. There's an assistant at one side. "We will be here for a while."

Ron says, "There's Quidditch."

There's something weird and flat about his tone. I look up. His skin has gone greenish. Yes, Ron always has been squeamish for an Auror, or even for the things we got up to in school. I never thought of him as delicate until now, with his phobias and his terror of having been outdone before he was born.

I smile, and he nods. "Quidditch fouls," he said.

Nigel says something in a strangled voice. The Healer flicks her wand to adjust the localized body-bind so that he can talk. "There now, dear," she says. "It's going to be a while, so you should get comfortable. Have a nice chat with your friend while we put this to rights."

They're not putting him under, general anesthetic or whatever is used for it in this world. It's a tricky operation, and I'm here… to distract. Nigel is very pale, not only from the loss of blood but the terror at what's going on. The assistant applies another Cheering Charm and the Healer says, "That's enough. No more." Nigel shivers as they vanish his clothes. I keep my eyes locked on his so that he doesn't feel quite so exposed, in the interval before they've draped everything except the joint. Now they are undoing the field repair; the Healer hums to herself appreciatively. I am being granted full marks on the way I left plenty of room for them to work and didn't attempt any healing on the tissue.

I begin a long, slow, pedantic explanation of the rules of Quidditch. Nigel stares at me. "What ever are you going on about?"

"It's a game, Nigel. The most important game of all. The madness of the locals, and you're going to be one of us a few days a month, so you should know about it."

The repair has been unzipped and now the skin and the layers of muscle are laid out in careful layers. I can see where some of the muscle has been torn loose from the bone. Nigel must be under several layers of deadening along with the body-bind and the cheering charms, or he wouldn't be looking at me quite so calmly. I'm staring at his face, unwillingly, because I don't' want to draw his attention to what they are doing, with wands if not scalpels. It's not pretty.

Ron has excused himself to run out into the hall.

"Seven witches or wizards on each team," I repeat. He stares at me, pale blue eyes and pointed nose and I don't know how I missed it before: that nose, that chin, those eyebrows. I was so taken with the joke that he was Draco's cousin that I didn't entertain the possibility he could be.

"So tell me about this daft game," Nigel says, having caught on. It's going to be hours here, and he'd rather not think about what they're doing to his arm.

The clavicle is bared now, and I can see the tooth marks in it, where fangs chased bone. There are more spells to suppress the bleeding, and then clear out the area, so they can see whence the bleeding came. The subclavian artery, apparently.

I explain about the hoops, and then the three kinds of ball: the Quaffle, the Bludgers, the Snitch…

"That's the daftest thing I've ever heard."

"But it gets better," I say with thoroughly synthetic cheer. The bleeding has started again, and there's something glowing in a malign way deep in the shoulder joint. "It's played on broomsticks, at least thirty feet in the air." I lean forward and feel the time-turner swing against the inner surface of my tunic. At least I don't have to stand in these awful shoes, but there's the Ministry ball, to which I'll have to return, and there's still blood in my hair. I can smell it, and feel the curls stiffened with it, as I casually pat my hair. Disgusting, but no worse …

.. no I will not think of comparisons. Nigel says, "So do you play this idiotic game?"

"No. Not usually." I remember the disastrous game at the Burrow, and the equally disastrous Quidditch drills with Malfoy. "I'm not all that keen on it."

Ron is behind me now, taking one of the chairs. "I play Keeper," he says. "At school, that is. And Harry is one of the best Seekers in a generation, so they say."

"Who's Harry?"

"Long story," I say, and then proceed to enumerate the fouls. That's a rich vein for conversation, because just what I remember of the subject from _Quidditch Through the Ages_ will take at least half an hour to recite. Nigel's eyes have begun to glaze over long before that.

Ron obliges by taking over the detail from me while I get up to get a glass of water. He starts telling the stories of the Gryffindor vs. Slytherin games from our first year onward, with particular emphasis on the perfidy of Draco Malfoy, though he looks at me from time to time for confirmation of what we shouldn't get into too much detail about: Dementors, for one (that stunt that Draco and friends pulled, coming out onto the field rigged up to look like one).

"Nasty bit of work," Nigel says.

_Speak for yourself_, I want to say, but don't. I'll have that conversation once he's out of danger.

_So just what sort of story did you think you were in?_ I'd like to ask him. _Some sort of office romance, or maybe those rude stories boys tell each other, where not taking no for an answer wins the day._ No, I'm not saying it aloud, just thinking it. He's gotten a rather nasty surprise, I think.

Ron says, "Though we really haven't played much Quidditch since the war."

"What war?" Nigel says.

"The one Justin told you about," I say, "and we'll talk more about that later."

Ron says, "Anyway, my sister played Seeker too. She's rather good. Once things settle after the war, she'll go professional, I think. Though it's a shame Harry doesn't want to play professionally. Of course in the circumstances…" I shoot him a _look_, and he says, "But never mind that."

It's going to be a long evening. Very long.

I wonder, idly, if anyone has alerted the Minister yet. He must still be dancing at the Ministry ball. And then there's Neville, waiting for me at the edge of the ballroom… time is passing. I will have to get back home. This could be sticky, very sticky indeed. No, I'm not going to think about it. Anyway, Neville probably knows I have a time-turner. I think there's probably a whole lot of them who know it, too, and the idiots in the Ministry were counting on it to wear me down even faster… well, it hasn't worked. I think that we'll be ready at this rate to make an attempt at Banishing the Dementors some time in April if we absolutely have to, maybe even March on the outside, though that would be stretching things.

Ron nudges me. Oh yes. Quidditch. "Some of the more notable records in the game," I say. _And tedious they are, but it's keeping him distracted._ "There are games that have gone on for days."

ooo

Time passes in hospital as in an altered state. I recognize the Healers' concentration as a cousin of my own. Deep in a task, you're in time and in eternity; all that matters is doing it right, and no matter how horrific, the details compel. I wonder if people defusing UXBs felt the same sense of cosmic wonder, with the terror of death pushed to the periphery. I had remembered them, when I was reading on that endless jaunt through the Britain that lay alongside the country of my childhood: in the tent, absorbed in ancient and malevolent volumes on the art and craft of the Horcrux. Those passages on the means by which a Horcrux might be destroyed were not written for witches seeking that end, but for the Dark magicians safeguarding that which they had created at the price of a riven soul.

I talked of Quidditch, and then I proceeded to wizarding family trees, what I remembered of the Black family tapestry, and Ron, bringing me another glass of water from the nice assistant in the anteroom, not by way of _Aguamenti_. The operating Healers had forbidden any casual magic lest it interact unfavorably with their work. Otherwise my throat would have been raw.

Nigel paid attention when we talked about who was related to whom.

"Grimmauld Place," he said. "Funny name. There's no number twelve, though." Ron raised an eyebrow.

"Marius Black, right?" I said, remembering the Squib blasted off the tapestry. "Born in the teens of the century, he would be…"

"He's still alive," Nigel said. "Rich as Croesus and twice as tight-fisted."

"He'd be in his eighties, wouldn't he?" I said, after pausing a moment to calculate.

Nigel frowned, looking at me.

"You've been _investigating_ my background," I said, "so all questions of rudeness are moot, aren't they?"

He flattened his mouth into a thin line and narrowed his eyes, producing an expression that looked altogether too much like Draco Malfoy in a huff. I hadn't realized how many of Draco's mannerisms actually belonged to the House of Black. Made sense, I supposed; in that sort of aristocratic menage, he would have seen more of his mother than his father.

"The old man's eighty-something, but he doesn't look a day over sixty," Nigel said. I made a note to investigate: what's the longevity of Squibs? I remembered some odd remarks of Filch, that implied he'd been at Hogwarts a long, long time. Did Squibs live as long as witches and wizards?

Nigel was very much more pleasant as a _problem for investigation_ than as a workplace annoyance.

I stared at Nigel as I mentally traced down the tree. "You're cousins, for certain. Your grandfather is either a brother or a first cousin to Draco's maternal grandmother."

"Second cousins at a minimum," Ron said. "I'd have to ask mum. She knows how all that works." He looked very hard at Nigel, making eye contact for much the same reason.

In my peripheral vision, Nigel's shoulder still looked like an anatomist's diagram, well, very much more like that and less like something out of a butcher shop, now that they'd located the source of the bleeding and cauterized some vessels and re-routed others. Re-grown some of the nerves, as well, so that Nigel might actually have most if not all of the function in that arm when they were done. I could tell from the look on his face that he didn't understand what the Healers had been saying all this time, but then I'd studied the magical equivalent of battlefield surgery in preparation for our trek. Once or twice, the chief Healer looked up to meet my eyes, appraisingly if I didn't mistake. I still couldn't place her features; she looked awfully familiar but from where…

Hours had passed. I didn't realize how many, until the Healer said something about the visitor's tea room opening for breakfast soon, notwithstanding it was New Year's Day. She said to Nigel, briskly, "You'll survive, dear. Now get some rest." In a whirl of magic, her assistant produced a hospital gown, pale green, against which the angry red scarring around the wound showed more vividly by contrast. "You're a very fortunate lad indeed," added the assistant.

The Healer looked at me, and said, "It's rare that we can repair the damage that far. He's a werewolf for certain, but there wasn't too much saliva in the wounds, or else… the outcome wouldn't have been so favorable." She frowned and narrowed her eyes, and said, "Hermione Granger, isn't it."

I nodded. Her hands now clean (in a rather showy but soundless cloud of green sparks, likely the Healer's version of _Scourgify_), she extended her hand. "Belladonna Parkinson. My old Head of House speaks well of you."

One minor mystery solved: of course, the tip-tilted nose and black hair, and yet another Slytherin Healer… but Snape couldn't have had anything good to say about me, not to judge from what I'd seen. My puzzlement must have shown, because she added, "Horace Slughorn, of course."

ooo

A minute later, Justin poked his head in, and Ron nodded, which clearly translated to _He's going to live_.

Justin smiled, taut and uneasy, and said, "Well, we'd best convene the officers of the Foundation."

Ron said, "I'll call Andromeda."

He looked inquiringly at the Healer, and she said, "You can use the Floo in the other room."

Ron shook his head. "I'm not sure if she's on the Floo network at all." He flicked his wand and the ghostly little dog looked at him in inquiry. He said to it, "There's been a Muggle casualty. A full werewolf. Meet us at St. Mungo's."

The Healer whistled softly in appreciation, and then recovered herself. "Nice Patronus," she said.

"If you don't need me, I'm going home," I said. Ron and Justin nodded.

"Sleep well," the Healer said, with rather more warmth than I would have expected from one of Pansy Parkinson's relations.

I nodded. Home it would be, but not to sleep.

ooo

I was home only briefly, in the foyer to turn back the time-turner and Apparate back to the little locked room off the main ballroom, and just in time… well, I must have been tired, because I materialized out of the twisting darkness to frantic knocking on the door, and Neville's voice saying, "Hermione, are you all right?" Just in time, too, because his next words were _"Alohomora!"_ rather more loudly than I would have liked. The door didn't merely open, but blew inward on its hinges.

Neville stood in the doorway, his face gone white. "What _happened_ to you?" he said. I shrugged, not understanding. "You're all over blood." I touched my hair, and then realized I hadn't stopped to clean any of it off; I'd forgotten entirely. He stared at me. "And your clothes…"

… were Muggle clothes, the ensemble in which I'd set off to that New Year's party. The shoes, too.

Nothing for it: he was going to have to be in on the conspiracy. I pulled him into the room, locked it again, cast _Muffliato_ again. "Stand still," I said, because I had to reach up to loop the chain of the time-turner about both of our necks. Back five minutes, and then Side-Along Apparition into the foyer of my parents' house… yes, I'd missed my previous self. I waved my wand to let him through the defenses, but not soon enough; he'd felt that hostile magic crawling on his skin, the same as Draco had, and his reaction was much the same.

"Blood wards," he said. "Hermione, that's …"

"… borderline Dark magic, and the least of our worries. Come upstairs, _now_." Because the last thing I needed was one of my other selves attempting to occupy the space where we were standing.

ooo

He stared at the contents of the room. Not the empty bed, but the books that rested on the bedside table and in a neat stack in the corner, very much out of place in the anonymous modern lines of what had been my parents' bedroom.

What had been my parents' bedroom, when they were still my parents. Briefly I wondered how Monica and Wendell Wilkins were celebrating the New Year. _No, it's already the New Year in Australia, and it's high summer there._

I blinked, and covered my eyes. Neville continued to look at the grimoires with the coat of arms of Durmstrang Institute on them, a ghost ship superimposed on a black sun. He looked at me.

"_On the Natural History of the Dementor_," he read, translating the Latin title of the book that had rested on my bedside table these how many weeks. It's the one to which I return over and over; Athanasius Delacour was a very thorough writer, even where he knew there were gaps in his knowledge… no, particularly where he recognized such lacunae. He mapped them out for me, and in the dark watches of the night Christmas Eve, I had occasion to thank that eighteenth-century wizard, dead these two hundred years and more.

He picked up the one in the modern binding. "_On the Banishing Rite_. This is a Durmstrang text, isn't it?" I nodded. "They don't teach this stuff at Hogwarts."

"No, they don't teach Reverse Necromancy at Hogwarts," I said. Unnecessary precision, or perhaps not. He continued to look at me, eyes dark with … attention, anyway. Pupils dilated. Whether it was horror or attraction or mere curiosity, I would find out shortly. I could feel my fingers tightening on the grip of my wand. If need be, I would bind him with _Fidelius_; we were too close to the matter. I could not risk someone telling.

He looked at me, and then he looked down. He said, "You should talk to Gran. Really. Because what you're about is dangerous."

"I know," I said, lifting my chin to look him in the eye. My pulse accelerated, and the words hung in the air between us: _so, are you going to call me a nascent Dark Lord?_

"You really don't believe in Azkaban," he said flatly.

"Neither do you. Said you'd go on hunger strike rather than see the children sent there." He looked at me again, his eyes dark. "And I said I'd stand with you. But this strikes me as very much more useful." I added, "And in any case, I've seen the reports on the rogue Dementors." Oh, very interesting. Derwent's _Fidelius _let me say that. Very interesting indeed. She'd been quite clear that her spell didn't prevent me acting on what I knew, and telling Neville was acting.

Yes. Because Neville had always been very much more about deeds than words.

He said, "So this is what you're about. Like Harry with the snake…" He swallowed. "Are you going to die of it?"

I shook my head. "I hope not. Anyway, your Gran probably knows about this anyway. Bill said that she was well informed as always." Or had that been Sinead Pierce O'Halloran who'd said that? Not a time or a place to mention the American Minister.

He swallowed again, and leafed through the book. His lips moved slightly as he read. I reached out and put a silencing finger over his mouth. "Not even silently, Neville. Those are _dangerous._" He blushed.

"My Latin's not so good as all that, I suppose." He said, "I suppose you can read this silently."

"I cast a Silencing Hex on myself before I start." He flinched.

"I'm not going to talk you out of it." His tone was flat and declarative; it wasn't a question.

"No more than you could have talked Harry out of what he was about, if he'd told you. Which is why he didn't tell any of us." I had seen those Pensieve memories too, Harry walking into that midnight forest alongside the shades of his mother and father and godfather. All the losses, to strengthen him in his resolve to join them. I cried every time I relived that scene with him.

Neville looked at me. "I'd join you." I shook my head.

"It's not a battlefield. Or at least, they aren't going to let me out there. I'm to stay behind the lines and take notes on the success or failure." I closed my eyes, and swallowed around the sudden tightness in my throat. "If we fail… someone has to have some ideas about what to try on the next attempt. If we get another try at it…"

"Does Harry know about this?"

I shook my head. "He's Ministry. We can't involve him." I wanted nothing so much as to cry, or to sleep, and I would have to go out there again, onto the dance floor at the Ministry, and pretend to be dancing and having a good time in the first new year of the peace.

Neville said, "You should change out of those clothes. They're all over blood. And they're Muggle." I nodded, and he took out his wand and cast a really quite competent _Scourgify._ My skin still itched, so I pulled the black tunic over my head and threw it on the bed, and unzipped the skirt and stepped out of it. "What are you doing?" he said.

"Changing out of those clothes, as you said. And I've been dying for a hot shower."

"But we have to get back to the ball."

I held up the time-turner on its slender golden chain. "I have this. We have all the time in the world." I saw his eyes darken even further, and smiled. "And there's room for two."

"All the time in the world," he repeated, and then he smiled as I stepped forward and unfastened the first of the old-fashioned buttons on his formal robes. He closed his eyes, as I undid the fastenings one by one. The under-robe was deep red, dense and heavy with a subtle brocade pattern woven through. Full formal robes, and all the medieval underlayers. Oh dear. "You dress like a Pureblood wizard," I said. The little observing voice in the back of my head laughed at me for having a kink for medieval robes.

He laughed too, a little nervously. "Gran insists on the full formal rig for special occasions."

I'd reached the final layer, the long white silk shirt, _no modern underthings under that, and yes he's interested. _ I looked up at the same moment he did, and he turned bright red and then recovered himself.

"We who are about to die salute you," he said.

It was a good thing that we had all the time in the world.

ooo

When we materialized in the little room off the ballroom, our hair was still damp; I realized that in our hurry, I'd forgotten the drying charms. Well, our hurry following a rather voluptuous stretch of sensual indulgence, first on the bed and then the floor (Neville had been curious, and then somewhat chastened at the minor abrasions on his back and shoulders, that I'd had to heal afterward.) And then a second shower, of course, and getting dressed, this time making sure of my outfit, that it was the correct set of formal robes. Black, rather starkly so, the very ones I'd worn to the Decommissioning of Malfoy Manor.

I was about to cast the drying charm when someone whispered, _Alomohora. _Neville pulled me into an embrace and kissed me rather enthusiastically; I resisted for a second and then realized what he was about. Better to be suspected of snogging than conspiracy. There was a rather satisfying little gasp, especially when I looked up to see that it was Rita Skeeter. I had my wand in my hand instantly, and Neville had already pivoted to face her.

She narrowed her eyes at me.

"Quite a public display, Miss Granger."

"I wasn't aware that locked rooms were public," I said with as much hauteur as I could summon. I took Neville's arm and we returned to the grand ballroom.

"She'll have it all over the papers that we're having a torrid affair," I said.

He nodded. "And she'll be right for once."

ooo

We danced until three in the morning, and my head swam with exhaustion and terror and exhilaration and lust. Of course, I'd been awake for eight hours longer than Neville had, between the surgery at St. Mungo's, and Ron had said something about an early-afternoon meeting. An emergency meeting with the Minister. I danced with Neville nearly exclusively once the Minister and senior dignitaries had left, and the band struck up contemporary favorites, including some of the Weird Sisters' repertoire. We danced closer than any other couple on the floor, and every time I closed my eyes I fell into blackness, and still we danced. I hadn't had a drop of alcohol but I felt utterly drunk.

When we came home through the Floo, Gran went to the formal drawing room. Unthinking, I followed her.

She didn't cast _Lumos,_ but stood in the darkness that was broken only by the flickering of tiny flames in front of a row of photographs: the young Muggle man in World War I uniform, and the baby in the long lace gown, and the cheap photograph of the dashing Eugene, the one that Neville told me was likely her lost love. Then there were the wizarding photographs: a tall strapping fellow in wizarding robes open over a dark jumper and pleated trousers, in the fashion of the 1940s. His grandfather, I supposed. She looked at them for a long time, the severe lines of her face softened in the candlelight.

Then I noticed the second row of pictures, a much more impromptu altar of the dead: there was a photograph of Remus, and another of Tonks, and then… Pansy Parkinson and Gregory Goyle and Vincent Crabbe and Blaise Zabini.

Emily was sitting in the frame of her portrait, the silver ornaments of her gown gleaming in the candlelight. She was eating a rather elaborate pastry, that looked as if it might have been nicked from a Dutch still-life.

"Happy New Year," she said to me. I nodded. Augusta Longbottom looked up to lock glances with her youthful avatar.

"Well," Emily said, "I hear you had a good time at the ball." She smirked. "We all know you never fancied blonds, but you might indulge yourself in a ginger or two."

"Horace doesn't count, and you know it," Augusta said.

"I wasn't speaking of Horace," Emily said with a smirk, and took a bite of her pastry. "Go on, lass, have a bit of fun. It's been grim enough." She added, in a rather more decorous tone. "I think the little Malfoy fell asleep."

Augusta nodded, and took up a silver candle-snuffer, and with a sigh went down the row of lights in front of the pictures of her dead. One by one the faces vanished into the darkness: first the young soldier, and then the baby girl, and then Eugene, and last of all, Neville's grandfather. I counted seven candle-flames flickering in front of the pictures of Draco's dead. There was a seventh face that I hadn't noticed before: Ted Tonks. His New Year's Eve mourning altar included not only his dead school friends but his disowned kin and his old Defense teacher.

No, his cousin by marriage. He was claiming them all as kin.

Draco was indeed asleep in the chair in front of the fire, his knees tucked up and his head pillowed on his arm, on the carved arm of the chair. On the floor, his Arithmancy textbook lay face down. I picked it up and set it on the table, while Augusta touched his shoulder to rouse him. "It's time," she said, handing him the candle-snuffer.

He got up, stretched and yawned a little. He looked at me, and then Neville, with that reproachful glance, turned, and walked into the drawing-room.

Neville looked at me in mute appeal: what were we going to do?

The house-elf materialized carrying a tray with a crystal decanter and three tumblers. Firewhiskey, I could tell from the gleam deep in the glass. Another political conference, I supposed.

Augusta took the tray and set it down on the table. "I think the three of you have things to discuss." She waved her wand and the flames leapt in the hearth, casting unaccustomed light and warmth into the front room. "Put the room to rights when you're done."

She and the elf dissolved into the darkness without a sound, as we stared at the bottle and waited for Draco's return.

ooo


	60. Chapter 60

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Neville looked at me in inquiry. Draco would extinguish those little candles, and then… we would talk. I had no idea what we were going to say, nor did Neville, for all we ought not to be caught flat-footed in the face of Augusta's directive to sort it out. I shouldn't have been surprised that she had noticed; she had eighty-some years of experience on us.

I still couldn't conceive of that kind of age difference, but this was not the time to wax philosophical. I took a look at my watch, and then at the clock on the wall. Where else was there a clock, and a door that we could lock? Augusta's study.

I took Neville's hand and pulled him to his feet. "Now," I whispered.

It was only a few paces to the door of the study, which now stood dark. I pulled us inside, locked the door, and looped the time-turner around our necks. Briefly I cast _Lumos_ to check the time on the clock on Augusta's roll-top desk, and then I calculated the necessary number of turns. An hour should give us time enough to hash it out, what we were going to do. No, best to make it an hour and a half. We had some serious thinking to do.

Neville held me close, kissed the top of my head. "You smell nice," he said, somewhat irrelevantly.

"Better than dried blood," I said, "though really most of it was Nigel's." He didn't even blanch. That's the thing I think I love best about Neville: he's stubborn as a rock, but steady. His faults _are_ his virtues, and vice versa. Just like me.

The little hourglass turned in my hands; these last months had made that gesture second nature.

I lighted the wand once more and looked at the clock; it was two o'clock in the morning. On one part of my timeline, I was at St. Mungo's, sitting at the surgical bedside with Ron and watching them reconstruct Nigel's shoulder. On another part of the thread, I was dancing with Neville at the Ministry. Did this moment also lie parallel to the timeline on which we'd taken the side-trip to my parents' house and disposed of the evidence of my exciting night? Oh yes, and had a bit of fun into the bargain.

The house was dark, and quiet. Neville and his Gran and I were away at the Ministry ball, and Draco was somewhere in the house, about his own business. Just to be sure, I locked the door, just as the elf materialized out of the darkness with a pot of hot tea. Yes, that was right. We were going to need something to stimulate our wits, that was for certain. The very normality of it reassured me.

Elves apparently weren't nonplussed by time-loops, or at least not this one; as promptly it melted back into the darkness. The standard for Apparition form in the Longbottom household was high indeed.

Neville poured me a cup, and I declined the sugar and milk, the lemon too. I wanted it plain, nothing to soften the edge of the stuff that I'd never liked all that much. Yes. Very fine it was, too. And we had an hour and a half in which to decide the question of Draco.

ooo

"As I see it, he's going to play us off one against the other," I said. "And we're both feeling a bit guilty." Neville looked at me with his owning-up-to-fault look. "He knows our weak spots, and the only way we're going to deal with him properly is by presenting a united front."

Neville nodded, looking not very happy. "What I can do, that's what I promised him." In the faint wandlight, I saw his cheeks grow hot. "And much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, he knew exactly how far that went."

I stared at the tea leaves swirling around in the bottom of my cup, which formed no pattern that I could recognize, or maybe I recognized the chaos of the post-war. Only in such a place could Neville and I be discussing our respective sexual compacts, or lack thereof, with Draco Malfoy.

"I didn't promise him anything," I said, "or at least I didn't think I did. But he thinks there's something, and his story is that I seduced and abandoned him." Yes, it would look that way to him. It would. I certainly hadn't turned him down, and I had held him as if I meant to comfort him. And after they tortured him, I had had nothing to do with him.

I still remembered the look of desolation on his face when he saw Neville and me holding hands on the morning of Boxing Day. Neville had told me that he'd seen us in the doorway to the terrace. That would have left very little to the imagination, as respected the nature of our interest in each other.

Neville said, "I'm not sure." He sighed. "I'm not sure what's the honorable course. If there is one." He looked at me defiantly. "I'm not giving _you_ up, that's for certain."

"Nor I you," I said, though I was momentarily taken aback that he'd even considered the option. No, I shouldn't be surprised: he'd reckoned up the promises implicit or explicit, and certainly that possibility might present itself to the unbiased mind. "He has three months and then Azkaban, that's it as far as I can see."

Neville stared at his hands. "Not a nice prospect." He said, "I have trouble thinking about that place."

"I don't," I said. "I was there." Oh, very interesting. The _Fidelius_ let me say that. I remembered the soulless shell of Rodolphus Lestrange, and tried to speak of it; no, it wouldn't let me go that far. I swallowed around the silence that had closed my throat, and took another tack. "I have trouble imagining Draco there." Yes, we were on first names, or at least I was with him, as with one's lover, or one's child. "He'll be … gone." I had no language for that: madness at a minimum, annihilation that left a bodily shell and no more. How had Sirius Black survived that place? With a whole lot more strength of character than Draco ever could claim, that was certain. Whatever his faults, Sirius had stood on bedrock. Draco trod a thin crust over annihilating void.

I flashed on the nightmare from the Room of the Requirement, the feeling of the mountain of debris shifting in its depths and the thrill of horror at the prospect of being buried alive in flaming rubble. My stomach lurched. I hadn't dreamed that in months… no, it had been over a year. A year in my twisted, doubled-over timeline. Draco was probably still dreaming it, and it might well have looped in his head forever in the presence of the Dementors.

I said, "I have to tell you something. I know things about him." I said, "From the Ministry. I've been through his memories. The worst…" and then to my surprise, I began to cry. "The worst… gave me nightmares. I can't believe this place. They're going to turn him over to relive that over and over. It's hell. I mean literally. It's not something mortals should be able to do to each other."

Neville put a comforting hand on my shoulder, and then pushed the tea things to one side and pulled me close. "He wants his mother," I said. "I feel really creepy about this." Then there was the other part. "He wants things from you that you refused. I gave them to him." Neville looked at me, dark eyes blinking in incomprehension.

"You told me that already."

"I didn't tell you the circumstances." Was I going to tell him? _I Polyjuiced as you and I … I ravished him. _Never mind that Draco had asked for that. I remembered what had passed through my mind as I'd done it.

"I don't want to know about the circumstances." He said, "We've both done dodgy things, and you were right to call me a stone god." He closed his eyes, and sighed, and closed his arms around me. "I'm not sure I want to know, because you have an imagination that terrifies me sometimes. And I'm enough of a judgmental ass, that if it's …" He paused for a long time, as if gathering himself. "Gran told me that sometimes the secret of a successful marriage is _not asking._ Not asking the thing you don't want to know. I didn't understand, at the time. I think I do, now."

I felt a chill at the bone. "So there are things… that would end this." I had a dreadful feeling that this _was_ one of them. There had been nothing in any of the technical references about the ethics of the sort of Polyjuice games I'd been playing, and suddenly I imagined: if Neville had done what I'd done, how would I feel about it?

He said, "She and my grandfather grew up in this village, but they didn't really know each other until the Blitz. They were on ambulance duty, up in Manchester. And they both had a bit of history by then. They'd both been married, and Gran…" He said, "Gran only told me recently. She'd had a child, before my father."

"Emily. The one who died of the Spanish flu." Neville shook his head.

"No. Another daughter, Miranda. Her child by Eugene. She was raised by his people, and … " he looked at me. "Anthony Goldstein isn't a Muggle-born. He's my cousin, by way of Miranda. His grandmother is my father's half-sister." He said, "Gran never told my grandfather. It was one of those things. She said she knew that he knew, at least that she was keeping a secret, but he never asked. Never asked in a way where she'd have to answer."

I frowned. "So…"

"The secret of a good marriage is to know when not to ask." He looked at me. "So I'm _not asking_ what happened between you and Draco."

It took a minute or two, and then I felt my jaw drop as if it belonged to someone else. "Neville… was that a proposal of marriage?"

"I suppose so," he said, and then he stammered, "But you don't have to decide anything right away, I mean, there are the NEWTs, and your apprenticeship, and of course your parents …" It was immensely reassuring to be back in the presence of the Neville Longbottom that I'd known for ages, so much so that I kissed him. Though I did feel something settle into place in my chest, in that deep place where you know that things have changed. Maybe not today, or tomorrow… but something had been decided already.

I looked up at the clock. Neville understood. There was the original agenda item, and we hadn't done more than introduce it. He cleared his throat. "So… what are we going to do about Draco." It wasn't really a question.

I frowned. "Well, it's awkward…" and then I remembered how we'd talked about him, about how he'd worked his wiles on both of us, and how that conversation had roused us. The implications, even now, had the same effect.

Saying it in so many words—well, _that_ was awkward. I looked at Neville, and realized that I was going to have to stop thinking of him as a young Edwardian gentleman or a virginal naïf. I carried some very contradictory pictures of him in my mind, and they were mostly wrong.

I said, "Remember how we talked this afternoon…" I bit my lip. "About how he'd finally _put his mouth to useful purpose._" Neville nodded, and the hitch in his breath told me that he was remembering, as well. I said, "I think we like the idea of sharing him." I squeezed my eyes shut, thinking maybe I'd said something just a little too perverse …

To my surprise Neville laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"The look on your face. As if you thought I might faint at the thought of something a little kinky."

Actually, the thought of the two of us in a threesome with Draco Malfoy was more than a little kinky, but weirdly plausible. In fact, if I didn't think about his surname, it seemed not all that strange at all. It did solve the question of honor and previous promises. Though certainly not in a way not likely to be acceptable to polite society, but that was a problem for later.

I said, "Well, I had assumed…" I laughed, because I _had_ assumed. Only half as a joke, I said, "Your strength is as the strength of ten, because your heart is pure."

He said, "Well, that doesn't say anything about my _mind,_ now does it?" Oh, dear. Now I had the picture of what Neville might have been thinking about _me_ all these years, when I'd been thinking of him as the sweet clumsy boy who needed defending. I felt my face grow hot. We might have some _very _interesting conversations later, but meanwhile …

"So you're not averse to the idea?" He shook his head, with a slow, crooked smile. I looked up at the clock. "Then I don't think I am either. So all that remains is to tell him."

"Oh, that won't be difficult." Neville smirked. "No missing a hands-on demonstration."

We settled the details, and then, with some minutes to spare, cast _Nox _and unlocked the door of the study_._ The clock ticked in the silence and darkness, and then a sliver of light opened at the threshold. I saw us silhouetted in the doorway, before closing the door. A brief glow of _Lumos,_ that showed only the clock-face, and then I heard Neville's voice in the darkness.

"You smell nice," he said.

My voice replied, "Better than dried blood, though really most of it was Nigel's." Then our previous selves winked out, on their way to the future.

I waited until I was sure I didn't hear their breath in the room, and then took Neville's hand and walked out to the front room, where the Firewhiskey decanter and three cut-glass tumblers caught the dancing firelight in their facets.

Draco joined us a few moments later, looking pale and apprehensive. His eyes lighted on us, and the firelight, and the generally unmistakable air of _family council._

We stood to greet him. "Happy New Year, Draco."

Neville poured a measure into each of the tumblers. "Firewhiskey. Old Ogden's," he said, handing a tumbler to Draco. I put out of my mind the thought, _plying him with liquor so we can have our way with him._

Neville handed the other tumbler to me. I accepted it, feeling the glass warm from his touch. "You know, I never thought I'd like the stuff. But it grows on you." _Rather too well_, I thought.

Draco laughed. He must have seen something in our faces. "Strictly ceremonial for me. I loathe the taste. Give me butterbeer or elf-made wine."

"My dad loves butterbeer. Says it's the wizarding world's great contribution to civilization. That, and Quidditch." The tears stung my eyes. I hadn't really thought about my parents, no, because it seemed out of reach to do anything about them. And now… well, now I had Augusta Longbottom on my side, and Percy Weasley (and oh gods, Percy-and-Augusta, what a formidable thought…)

Neville said, "Your dad likes Quidditch?"

"He took the _Prophet _from second year onward to follow the professional teams. Arthur Weasley got him hooked on it, I gather." As in August, I stared at the firelight reflecting in the decanter. "I miss my mum and dad something awful."

Neville put an arm around me and hugged me, then lifted his tumbler. I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror over the fireplace; we did look like a married couple. "To our absent parents," he said.

We clinked glasses and drank. Draco made a face as he drank his off.

Neville refilled the tumblers and nodded to me.

"To the New Year," I said. "May we get out of it alive." I realized a second too late that that might not have been the most appropriate sentiment, given where Draco would be going. We clinked glasses. Draco watched me over the lip of his glass as he drank, with a look of studied neutrality.

We put down the tumblers at the same time, the clunk of glass on the polished wood suddenly loud in the silent room.

How to begin the next part? May as well speak it plainly.

Somewhat awkwardly, I said, "And to life debts." Yes, that was it, wasn't it? We had interfered in the onward sweep of retribution and now he was ours by adoption. "I think they run both ways. We're just as bound to you as you are to us."

Neville smiled at me, and nodded almost invisibly. I put my tumbler down on the table, and stood. The space between us felt vast, and I was surprised that I crossed it in only three steps.

I took Draco's hand, which felt cold and passive in mine, and drew him to his feet. He didn't flinch. Very tentatively I put my hands on his shoulders—still no flinch, but his lips parted slightly and his eyes widened—and then I kissed him.

"Happy New Year," I said. His eyes flickered away from me—presumably to Neville—then back, so I thought I ought to repeat the gesture. I put my arms around him and drew him close, so that I felt the slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. "It's all right," I whispered in his ear, and he relaxed into the embrace with a little sigh. I closed my eyes and as my mouth came to rest on his, I noticed the little shifts in his body. He was thinking about this, somewhat mistrustfully.

Very carefully, as if he feared poisoning, he let me part his lips.

He tasted like firewhiskey and smelled of sleepy child. I suppressed an internal shiver; another moment when I felt radically wrong doing this, when the eighteen-year-old in my arms turned into a nine-year-old. I ran my hands over his shoulders to reassure myself: no, this was not the body of a child. I made the kiss a little more aggressive, exploring his mouth, and had a sudden flashback to kissing Ginny in the loo at the Three Broomsticks. Then I almost giggled, thinking: _except for Neville, I suppose I do have a thing for Quidditch players. _

Nonverbal communication: _Yes, Draco, this is about sex. My tongue in your mouth, and yes, Neville knows what I'm doing._ For good measure, I ran my hands down his back and over his rump, giving him a little squeeze. He squirmed against me, half resisting.

I took his hand again, and held it out to Neville. Neville smiled, rose to meet Draco, and took his proffered hand as if they were about to begin a minuet. Of course, Neville did know how to dance a minuet. He commanded all the graces of a young gentleman of good society, including a fine grasp of the elements of seduction, I thought, as he swept Draco into an embrace that was nothing short of masterful, tipped his head back, and kissed him.

I heard a distinct gasp from Draco—ah yes, the penny just dropped—followed by a visible relaxation in his posture. When Neville released him, he was pink and disheveled.

"I don't understand," he said.

I said, "We're with you, Draco. Until the end, whatever that is." I added, with the sense of intoning the words of a ceremony, "Whether that's Azkaban or something else."

"You mean… both of you." He looked from one of us to the other.

"Yes," Neville said. "Both of us. And each of us separately." I nodded. That was the compact.

Out of nowhere I remembered the last bit of a poem memorized years ago. Formal and naughty both, and so appropriate to the current occasion. "Though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run."

Draco blushed. I wasn't sure if he recognized the reference or only the sentiment. Neville smiled, as if pleased with his handiwork.

"We're alive, up to the very last minute," I said.

Neville glanced at the window, and said, "Full-moon curfew, or I'd suggest a stroll on the grounds after."

Draco looked at him, and then at me. "After?"

"After we celebrate the New Year," I said. "However you would care to."

I thought I might never forget the look on Draco's face. He stared from one of us to the other, with his mouth open. Then he closed it, and blinked. We'd left him speechless. Except that the context was untoward, I was half tempted to save the story for Harry or Ron. Old habits die hard, after all. They would have been amused by it.

Less amused, of course, by the context: Neville and I had just told him that we'd both have him… if he'd have us.

Finally he said, "What do you mean, celebrate the New Year?" He perfectly well knew, because his eyes were rather bright and his cheeks flushed.

Neville looked at him, and said, "Whatever you might fancy. If that's turning in for the night, you could open the new year with a nice lie-in …"

Draco looked at us both and narrowed his eyes. He knew that Neville was both having him on and offering a choice.

"Or it could be this…" I stepped up to him and pushed him so that he stumbled backward into Neville's embrace. Neville understood, and seized his wrists. I leaned in so that I was almost touching him but not quite, and said, "Something like _this_. Or something else. We could drink the rest of that bottle of firewhiskey. If you want to start the new year with a raging hangover."

Neville caught my eye and shook his head on that latter.

I was quite sure that wasn't the option Draco was going to choose, not from the way that his face went sleepy and intent. He wriggled in Neville's grasp and managed to rub against both of us.

He said, "Traditional dress, Granger. I understand you like that sort of thing."

I was gratified at the way he jerked involuntarily as I ran my hands up under his clothes.

"Is this what you had in mind?" I asked in a whisper. He nodded.

ooo

After that it was equal parts awkwardness and fun. After that I remembered hot sleek skin in the firelight, Neville and I working out without words what Draco might like. I caught myself thinking that we worked well together, regardless of the task.

It was more than a few times.

To be frank, I lost count, because I kept falling asleep toward the end, and wondering if we'd ever wear him out. I woke from the last of the little blackouts, absently stroking something nicely silky, with bony projections, and thinking that poor Crookshanks had gotten far too thin. I was murmuring, "That's a nice kitty," but on blinking awake, my fingers were smoothing Draco's hair over the vulnerable bony curve of the back of his neck, and he was nuzzling against my shoulder.

We were lying in a half-dressed heap in front of the still-roaring fire, and the warmth wrapped around me was Neville's arm and chest. He was holding both of us in his warm embrace.

Utter luxury, if I weren't half-mad with sleep deprivation.

He shook me gently. Draco startled awake with a cry, and Neville said, "We should get up and dress, unless you want Gran to find us here in the morning."

Draco recoiled as if he'd been dashed with cold water, and wrapped his robes around him—upside down and backward, but it was the thought that counted. Then he fished about in the errant folds, and extracted his wand. "Look," he said, whispered _Lumos_, and the tip lit to a serene starry blue.

I leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, and Neville patted his shoulder, both rather diffident gestures, given what we'd been doing, but it was late. Past five in the morning. In only a few hours, it would be dawn, and I didn't want to think how long I'd been awake.

We gathered up our clothes, shook them out, and put them on. Before Neville had a chance to quell the fire in the hearth, the elf appeared out of the darkness and nodded us away.

Like children going off to bed, we trailed up the stairs in single file. We saw Draco to his room, and then without talking about it, Neville took my hand and we went into his room, and fell asleep under the feathery shelter of his many plants, to sleep the first hours of the new year in each other's arms.


	61. Chapter 61

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Hermione was standing on the battlefield again, only this time it was oddly dreamlike: smoke wafted in whorls like cigarette tendrils writ large, and there was the swordsman in the middle of it, as if in a film: broad shoulders and round face, brows drawn together in concentration. she saw him turn in slow motion, raising the blade, and then bring it down, and the serpent's head dropped to the ground, and the great rearing body that had been poised to strike dropped likewise, and slapped the dust so that it rose in a veil...

... as if it were memory, or dream. More like dream, because she felt no sense of peril, only a sort of free-floating voluptuous desire, dream-desire that was already fulfilled in the pleasure of feeling it. The swordsman finished his blow, and then dropped the sword in sheer surprise, thus leaving the landscape of legend: that was Neville, his gesture as well as his lopsided smile of sheer astonishment. Dead one minute and the next, triumphant. It was a shock that would disjoint sturdier frames than his...

... and then she was in his arms, and she herself not unarmed: basilisk fang in one hand, wand in the other. Only (as the dream receded like a tide going out, much against her will) that wasn't her memory, it wasn't the way it had happened; yes, she'd been in a passionate embrace though not with Neville. Waking, she still remembers the heat of Ron's mouth on hers, her hands on him, reading the body through the clothes as his were doing ... no wonder Harry had been put off; what they had been thinking was even more unseemly than what they did.

Half out of dream, in which inexplicably both she and Neville were wearing no clothes, she realized that it wasn't a dream at all, not the part about the hot slide of bare skin against skin. She was lying inside the curve of his arm, against his chest, and their legs were lying entangled hip to ankle. She felt the chill of the room on the top of the head; all the rest was in the shelter of the covers, and the friendly furnace of his body.

She was in bed with Neville, and neither of them was wearing clothes. As she woke, she remembered what else had happened the night before.

There had been a dream she forgot the moment that her eyes opened: chasing about, and things left undone for too long, and a sense that some doom hung over her that she alone could prevent... if only she could get things finished in time. Her heart raced, and she knew that she hadn't had enough sleep. No, she hadn't had enough sleep these last months... however many months it had been.

It was hard to keep count: Christmas Eve had been a week, after all.

Snow was sifting down, dimly lit, and it was just after dawn, if she could judge aright from the glimpse through the parted bed-curtains... something wrong with that picture. She wasn't at Hogwarts, and she couldn't be at her parents' house... and she wasn't in the tent on the endless expedition, because she was warm, enfolded in an embrace that reminded her of early childhood. She shifted restlessly, and her companion let out a soft sigh and pulled her closer, one arm around her shoulders under the pillows.

What had she done? Gone out on New Year's Eve... three or four times, her brain remembered, and then there had been that dream, embracing Neville and then Draco. No, that had been real, as real as Neville asleep next to her, dark hair tumbled over his brow and lips moving faintly in dream. He was certainly dreaming; she could see his eyes moving under the lids. She ought to be asleep and dreaming herself. It was only faintly light outside, and it had been no more than three hours since she'd gone to bed... after forty hours awake?

She remembered wrapping herself in the covers in her little bed at Hogwarts to cry silently, or as silently as she could, and then the knock on the door... months it had been, months, but she still remembered the sense of desolation. No one to turn to.

And she'd told him as much, when he'd said that Ginny wasn't the one he was watching and that he'd messed up his heart's desire.

Thick, she had to be. He'd been declaring himself even then. Lavender's voice saying, "He's doggedly devoted. It's the Longbottom way." She turned in the embrace and kissed his bare shoulder, and he murmured something unintelligible.

Dreaming, only dreaming. Only it's real life, she thought. And I need more sleep to face it. In a moment, she would sit up and pull those bed-curtains closed the rest of the way so that the thin slice of snowy dawn would not wake her...

... and that was her last thought, until she woke to Neville's voice saying, "Happy New Year." She burrowed into the warmth, under the cave of the covers between their two bodies. She had migrated in her sleep so that her head was resting on his shoulder, and the bolster under her knees was his outflung leg.

"What time is it?"

"Too early. Go back to sleep," he murmured. There was an afternoon meeting, but... she didn't get the words out of her mouth, because the solid warmth under her was far too attractive, and with it the prospect of sleep. More sleep. Yes, very much more sleep: a delicious cavern of thick covers, warm pliant flesh, and the black depths of dream.

She fell back into the sea, and dreamed again. This time she was flying, whooping with delight as she skimmed over the grey waves... off the coast of Scotland. where she'd been wont to Apparate for practice (her waking mind would have remembered November, only her dreaming mind knew better: it was a long time ago, and she was returning). Only she wasn't alone; someone flew alongside, so close in fact that the broom-handles banged together, and then she was reaching, leaning, to kiss her lover who was flying alongside, bruising his mouth and hers, until they crashed... not into the sea, but altogether too soft grass, the Quidditch pitch at Hogwarts, except the grass was tall and very soft, like long hair brushing her face, as she rolled with him, tugging his clothes out of the way, and his sharp teeth flashed at her, "No you won't wear me out," he said, "We'll live forever." Which made no sense, after the manner of dreams, and she half knew it, even in the dream, and then there was dim light between the curtains of the bed and a dark silent presence - Augusta's elf - and she fell asleep again.

Only to be roused some centuries later (she was grabbing at the last remnants of sleep and hugging them to her as if she could eat those last moments of rest, store them away against the days of sleeplessness)... by a warm pleasant pressure on her shoulder that rocked her, at first soothingly and then with increasing insistence. "Go 'way," she murmured, although she didn't really mean it. what she meant was that it could stay, as long as it let her sleep.

"Hermione," it said, finally, and she resolved the warm buzzing into a voice. Neville's voice. "Breakfast. Gran wants us to come down to breakfast." She bared her teeth at it, and reached for her wand. Neville caught her wrist, and said, "No, I'm not dueling anyone this early in the morning." He laughed, and she released the grip on the wand and let it drop to the bedside table, and sat up, however unwillingly.

There was the pitcher and bowl, and the hot water was steaming. She smiled: very old-fashioned, but it would do for a quick wash.

He said, "Gran says it's too late to be breakfast, but she'll compromise and call it an early luncheon." She liked his voice, she realized, liked it very much, could happily rest against his chest while he talked and she went back to sleep.

She sat up, and then realized that it was chilly and she wasn't wearing anything under the covers.

He smiled at her and said, "You can have the bath first."

Outside, the chill of the room made her shiver, even as Neville handed her a dressing-gown and cast a warming charm. She smiled and assured him that she wouldn't be long.

ooo

She sorted through the clothes: well, there were the dress robes from last night, but those wouldn't look right for breakfast, and Neville had told her that there would be guests. Andromeda Tonks was to be putting in an appearance, on request by her nephew. They were to be conferring after breakfast. A late breakfast, Gran had reminded him. He grimaced a little, that slightly abashed look that unaccountably she found quite attractive, and ran one hand through his hair. It was standing on end, actually.

"I have a meeting in the early afternoon," she said.

Neville said, "Then we'll have time for a walk before." Unspoken, _and time to confer about what's just happened_. Rather a lot of change in a few days, and she could feel the shock of it, even in her doubled-over timeline. There had been _rather a lo_t of excitement since her last day working at the Ministry: two rescue missions, only one of them planned; weeks upon weeks of research; two lavish parties, a Christmas party, and ... quite a bit of private time with Neville.

She reached into the blue beaded bag and found an ensemble that wouldn't do too badly for breakfast with Madam Tonks and Madam Longbottom, and that could be worn on a short ramble, with the necessary addition of warm boots and windproof layers.

Neville was smiling at her as she dressed. He was lying on his side on the bed, just as he'd been lounging on the floor in his rooms on the apprentices' corridor, with that very same smile and darkening eyes... except as yet no clothes. He turned a pleasant shade of pink when she turned to look at him, and then to remind him that he ought to get dressed as well. Not that she minded the present ensemble, but it wouldn't do for breakfast, even accompanied by a warming charm.

He blushed and set about the task of looking in the wardrobe for reasonable clothes. He still had quite a few things here, she noticed; well, with the Floo and Apparition, a daily commute from Lancashire to London wasn't more than a step or two... a jarring and sooty step.

They descended the stairs and walked into the dining room where the fire was already crackling in the hearth and Draco was seated at Madam Longbottom's left hand, with Andromeda Tonks at the foot of the table. Neville seated himself at his grandmother's right hand, and Hermione next to him.

The first of the dishes materialized on the table - buttered eggs and black puddings - along with a pot of tea and a carafe of coffee. The coffee made the rounds of the table, pouring into the upturned cups. Draco put his usual unconscionable amount of sugar and milk into his coffee, and smiled at her, a smile with only a trace of his old sarcasm. He looked sleepy and content; the smile was almost involuntary. It kept appearing on his face, as if it would require conscious effort to banish it.

Then he looked right at her, and turned pink, the smile growing broader for a moment before he looked down into his coffee cup, as if something important were written on the swirling surface.

Neville looked at him, and then cast her a sidelong glance that had more than a trace of _smirk_ in it. Hermione looked up to meet Andromeda's eyes: dark grey in that aristocratic face, one light-brown brow momentarily quirked.

They spoke very briefly of the meeting in the afternoon; Andromeda had been summoned as well, in her capacity as an officer of the Remus Lupin Foundation.

Hermione could still feel her lack of sleep; she would fortify herself as best she could with strong coffee and Gran's solid breakfast, but somewhere on the afternoon's agenda would be a lie-down... there was a lot to think about. Oh yes, and from Draco's expression, she suspected there would be more of the sort of thing they'd done last night, except this time she'd be sure to be awake for it.

ooo

Hermione ate her breakfast and watched surreptitiously. When she caught Gran's eye, the expression on her face was covert amusement. Of course, Gran knew exactly what was going on between her and Neville, and probably between them and Draco as well.

Andromeda was watching as well: her face, and Neville's, and Draco's, though most of her attention was reserved for her nephew.

After breakfast, Hermione and Neville set off in the misty morning, the world muffled in snow. It felt dreamlike, and the coffee at breakfast had made only the faintest dent in her sleepiness. No, put an edge on it. Gran had offered her a dash of Pepper-up Potion for her last cup of coffee, and now she felt far less horrid.

They climbed the stile, Neville handing her up, which still amused her. He saw the smile, and cocked one eyebrow interrogatively. More like Gran every day, or maybe she hadn't noticed the resemblance before. "You're a perfect gentleman," she said. "You even helped me through the portrait frame when we came into Hogwarts through Aberforth's secret passage."

"Oh, you looked a fright," he said. "Your hair was singed and you were covered in soot." It must have been the Gringotts dragon, she thought. It hadn't been only Bellatrix who'd done for her hair.

He smiled. "But I've never been so glad to see anyone... platonically of course. Then. Harry and Ron, for certain." He put his arms around her, and then on second thought lifted her off her feet, to bring her face up to the level of his, and kissed her soundly, on both cheeks and then her mouth. "This is what I'd have done then, if I'd been able."

She returned the kiss, waking up a little more. Yes. This was very nice, very nice indeed. He relinquished her with reluctance, and her feet found the ground.

He said, "But we have to talk." Of course, Draco. "Andromeda's having a talk with Draco in Gran's study. You know about what." She shook her head.

"He talked about it last night."

She didn't remember that. Of course, she'd been falling asleep.

"The letters." No, this was new. "To Katie and Ron and Bill, and that was just starters. I told him to talk to someone he trusted. Someone who wasn't a Death Eater. So, Andromeda. She'd know the ins and outs." He added, "And I gather she's standing _in loco parentis."_

"I know, but what letters?"

"The apologies he wanted to make. The harm he did and didn't mean." Neville frowned at the horizon and she saw his free hand close into a fist, and unclose. "Last night... after... he talked. Rather a lot." An uneasy pause. "He was never that talkative in bed..."

Then the pause she recognized, Neville thinking _now I've made a mess of it_. Of course Neville would know what Draco was like in bed. From previous experience.

Well, she had previous experience as well. "I know. He talked to me about Azkaban."

"He wants to set his affairs in order, generally. So, letters of apology, in strictest confidence. Not to be taken into evidence in the trials. He doesn't want anyone thinking he's begging for his life."

She nodded. If you were doomed, at least you could go out with good form.

"And there's something... something we ought to talk about."

"Draco?"

"No. You." He licked his lips, and frowned, and squeezed her hand. "You. You're wearing yourself out. Worrying about everything, so far as I can tell."

"Things are complicated."

"Of course they are. But you said it to me, when I was being an insufferable ass. You don't have to carry it all alone."

She didn't remember. That had been months ago, in her timeline.

"Are you even sleeping?"

"I sleep."

"Six hours last night, wasn't it? And you were awake more like forty."

She stopped still, and turned to stare at him. He was looking at her, his brow furrowed and his face aglow with tenderness.

"I don't remember."

"You talked last night too, once we were in bed." The frown deepened. "You don't remember. You really don't remember. You were talking about Nigel Black, and the werewolves, and how Pansy Parkinson's cousin was the presiding Healer at the operation where they repaired his arm, and how Ron Weasley is too squeamish to be an Auror, and what the Muggles are going to make of it. And that the Aurors have been killing Muggle werewolves, and that Nigel knows Justin Finch-Fletchley, and hates Draco, and they're cousins. Nigel and Draco." He caught his breath. "And then I know you've been working on the Banishing project, and three or four other things I probably don't know about, and Percy Weasley came in for mention, and your parents."

Sleep deprivation worked wonders, she thought. No need for Veritaserum; she was spilling it all. Of course, she comforted herself, Neville already knew, or had guessed, most of the details.

"And something about your parents, and the house." He said, "You ought to talk to Gran about that house. Blood defenses are nothing to fool with. Not if you have Muggle relatives in the mix."

"My parents aren't coming back until after the trials, at a minimum." She said, "If they let them come back at all. Percy looked into it for me." She said, "I will have to follow up with Percy. I've done my part of the bargain. Ginny's safe now, or as safe as she's going to be, assuming she wasn't in fact mixed up with the Auror death squads." She looked him in the eyes. "And I don't think she was. Ginny, even Ginny mad, wouldn't go that far. It's not her style." She said, "McConnell, on the other hand..."

"McConnell set up Draco to be tortured to death." The frown was a glower now. "She didn't cast Cruciatus herself, but she - and whoever else is involved in this - ought to go to Azkaban. Using _children_..."

"I certainly hope that Kingsley's looking into it." Along with the several thousand other things Kingsley ought to be looking into. Another thing to ask Percy, when next she saw him: what was happening with that dossier about the population estimates and the post-war retributions... well, the covert civil war, not to put too fine a point on it. "Of course, it's a fair question how far they'll let him do anything about it, even if he decides to act..."

And then there was the vexed question of the office of Minister itself, how far its bindings would permit him to act.

And then, of course, there were the Goblins and their demands. Yes, that should be on Kinglsey's desk as well, and not by her hand. The question, of course, was how anyone was going to bestir themselves, given the history.

Neville said, "You have that look again." He touched her face, tracing her hairline with feathery tenderness. "As if you were getting ready to take them all on... "

He smiled, but his eyes made it sad. "And you will, but you're not alone. Just don't forget that. You're not alone." He gulped, and said, "I love you. And so do the rest of them." She must have frowned, too, because he went on, "Harry and Percy and Lavender and Ron. Luna and Dean. Bill and Fleur. They've all talked to me at one time or another. Ginny, once she's in her right mind. Because I know how she talked about you when we were at Hogwarts last year."

He said, "Even Draco."

She shook her head. She still had the whole business classified under some other heading, _fling with a condemned man, perhaps,_ or _something on the side._

"He said it last night." He turned pink. "Both during and after. To both of us. But you in particular, because you've taken up for him, and his parents. I didn't think anyone could make that kind of impression on Draco Malfoy."

A dim recollection of fine damp hair and an unexpectedly soft mouth against her neck, mouthing incoherent noises of surrender... or allegiance. Anything she wanted, anything, as she and Neville held him in place. Anything, body and soul. She'd assumed that was just the heat of the moment, and not anything in the nature of a political statement. Well, especially given the circumstances, and what they were doing to him at the time: a sort of confession under duress.

"He's self-interested." Of course. What she didn't add: and not in his right mind, if he'd ever been.

"Nonetheless. Harry and Ron depended on you in the war, and now it's quite a few others. And you're exhausting yourself."

ooo

The late-morning light shone through the pearlescent fog, and her heart lifted as the landscape glowed. She let the warming charm slip a bit, so that cold air could wrap her face and make her blood tingle. There was nothing more to be said. There was the work ahead, and right now there was the walk. One foot ahead of the other, in long swinging strides. She and Neville kept pace, for all the difference in their heights; it was good to have a companion.

She had missed that feeling, in the treacherous ground of the postwar.

She regretted the point where they turned to begin the homeward leg, for the day was brightening and it would have been pleasant to keep walking until night found them again.

All too soon, Longbottom House resolved out of the thinning mist, its dour stone lit to austere precision, standing solid and unmistakably real as the sun shone out for a brief moment until the diaphanous veil closed over it once more. She turned to Neville. "That was a good walk."

He opened to doors to the terrace, and they stepped through, into what seemed like unreadable gloom, after the bright diffuse light of outdoors.

He took her hand and kissed her on the mouth. "I'll see you tonight," he said. Unspoken, _come back here, and please no Time-Turner adventures today._ She supposed she could take one day off. Yes. It would give her time to think.

Andromeda Tonks stared at them, and then recovered herself. Draco, behind her, smiled at both of them; there was something naked and unguarded about his face without any of its usual expressions.

Andromeda said, "I'll be back this evening, directly as I finish."

Draco nodded.

Neville took his arm and said, "Would you fancy a game of chess?"

Draco made a sour face, Hermione wasn't sure by way of estimate of Neville's skill at chess, and Neville amended, "Or Exploding Snap, or some other game." When he added, "There are ways to pass time," Draco turned pink.

Hermione smiled. She had her guess. Meanwhile, events awaited her. She stepped back onto the terrace and turned in a circle to Apparate to the alley outside St. Mungo's.

ooo

Dean and Luna were just coming in the doors as she adjusted her hair. Apparition didn't tousle one's coiffure, only bent the structure of space-time in one's immediate vicinity, but the London air had greeted her with a raw, damp gust of wind as she'd materialized in the alley.

"Good to see you!" Dean said. "Even if it is a major crisis."

"Bill told us, by Patronus." Luna took her wand from behind her ear to Vanish the snow on her hair. She added, absently, "Oh, and Ginny sends her best."

"She's making a good recovery, at Grimmauld Place," Dean said. "Percy thought she'd be ready to make an expedition to London, in a few days. So we're bringing her to meet my little sisters."

Hermione shook her head, as if to clear a cloud of Luna's befuddling creatures. "How do your sisters come into it?"

"Oh, they know her from my pictures," Dean said. "They've started copying them, and want to interrogate her on fine points of Quidditch."

The statute of discretion, she thought. How secrecy of any form was going to hold up in the postwar, she wasn't sure. But it wasn't her problem. She could not put everything on her agenda; there simply wasn't room. Neither world enough nor time, really: Neville had a point about that, she thought.

"So, how is the art coming along?"

"Very well, thanks. The print's gone into another edition." Blaise and Draco, famous in Muggle circles: yet another irony of the postwar.

Luna flicked her wand, and the noise of the lift disappeared in a muffling silence that had the quality of early-morning snowfall. "Bill's told us about the other thing, too," she said. "The Banishing."

Dean nodded. "We're in." Smiled that predatory grin that found no echo in his eyes. "Not Ministry. The Aurors didn't invite me. And Luna turned them down."

She nodded, thinking about the research questions about which she wasn't completely sure. That number didn't include the likely fate of anyone in the Ministry who did involve themselves in the Banishing: into the Void, as surely as if they'd been Kissed.

And what would happen to the Ministry when the Dementors, as a Hive-Demon, had been consigned to the Nothing from which they had come? Well, that picture was coming clearer, and it wasn't pretty.

But for now, they had to attend to the rather more minor problem of a cross-border werewolf incursion. Merely a diplomatic matter. Werewolves scared her rather less than Dementors. She twirled her wand absently, counting off her fears in ascending order: well, Voldemort had been knocked from his perch as leading issue of the day, leaving the rogue Dementors. Well, that, and the diplomatic mess, of which she glimpsed only shadows and hints, and the death squads in the Aurors, and the domestic problem generally. The more she thought about it, the more troubling it seemed that a pack of werewolves had shown up quite conveniently at a bankers' holiday party...

... No, she'd expect vampires, really, if one were going to pair like with like.

Joking aside, well, jokes helped.

Then there was Umbridge's shadowy battalion of proteges, and the former Undersecretary herself, and the very-much-alive Pureblood supremacy movement, and the cross-currents in the Ministry, which frankly she had no hope of reading accurately.

"It will be interesting," Luna said. "Daddy's working on the _Quibbler._ It's quite impressive now that he has backers." She said, "We're putting out a number about the Werewolf Question. He's quite sure that it will sell _thousands._"

Yes, thousands would be quite respectable circulation, if the population figures were right. The population figures that were sitting on Kingsley's desk right now, she hoped, not gathering dust in some pigeonhole. The population figures that should tell the Minister that they had something under a generation in which to get it right, or go extinct.

If pure sucking Void didn't get them first, which it might well.

"Hermione," Dean said, gesturing toward the open doors of the lift in an odd parody of a court-bow. She blinked. Oh. They had arrived at the floor. The Dangerous Creatures ward. Smethwyck's domain.

And then there was Boudicca Derwent's territory, in Spell Damage...

Yes. That was another thing to worry about, what was going to happen to the edifice she had built, which would make the next round of repression ever so much more efficient. She wasn't sure that Percy Weasley's Luddite irregulars were going to make a dent in it, well, no, one shouldn't dismiss the power of bureaucratic obstruction. Percy was a maestro in that line, himself. On the other hand, his recruits were playing rather another game...

There was too much to think about.

ooo

When she stepped through the doors of the Spell Damage ward, Justin told her that the Remus Lupin Foundation had mustered, pretty much the whole lot of them. Bill stood guard outside the ward, and Fleur, Padma and Seamus were keeping watch around Nigel's bed. The Healers had arrived, Boudicca Derwent and Hippocrates Smethwyck. Presumably Healer Parkinson had gone home.

One face was conspicuous by its absence.

"Where's Ron?" she asked.

"We sent him home," Parvati said. "Since he's only a trainee with the Aurors." And he'd spoken up in her support, if only to warn them that she wasn't to be trifled with. Yes. Ron was in a rather delicate spot there.

It was going to be a long morning. She was glad of that coffee, and the Pepper-up.

That could grow addictive, too.

ooo

**Author's Note:** We're now officially in the endgame, and I'm resolving the schedule gridlock between fan-fiction updates, original fiction career, and day job. Thank you all for your patience and your continuing interest in this story!


	62. Chapter 62

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

In the Dangerous Creatures ward, Mrs. Finch-Fletchley, in formal silk suit and pearls, stood to greet Andromeda Tonks. "A pleasure to see in the New Year with you, although the circumstances could certainly be better." She turned to Hermione. "And Miss Granger, thank you for your attention to Nigel Black."

Hermione tried not to think about Nigel's own _attentions_ to her.

Healer Smethwyck said, "The patient has been reassured that he's safe."

"I'm not sure I would be _reassured_ under the circumstances," she said. Nigel had to have some notion of the peril, unless his privilege really did make him completely oblivious.

"He's been asking after you."

Hermione couldn't suppress a sigh. There was quite enough on her agenda, thank you, and she'd really rather not have further to do with Nigel Black. Nonetheless … "Well, I'll visit him, if you insist. But after the meeting."

ooo

Mrs. Finch-Fletchley took the reins. "The matter is simple. We have a diplomatic crisis. Kingsley Shacklebolt is going to be obliged to have a rather awkward conversation with Ten Downing Street."

Hermione noted with admiration that Mrs. Finch-Fletchley didn't say _I told you so,_ given that she'd raised the issue in the first place. She wasn't sure that she'd have been able to restrain herself in similar circumstances.

"As I understand, Mr. Black has been turned to a werewolf, and will need to be sequestered in St. Mungo's every full-moon period for the rest of his natural life."

Smethwyck nodded encouragingly, as Mrs. Finch-Fletchley continued, "The immediate window of peril, of course, is the period from moonrise to moonset on the night of the full moon, but the period of disability is a bit longer; the patient is likely to be short-tempered and impulsive in the few days before full moon, and then exhausted from the transformation for two to three day afterward, even with the mediation of the Wolfsbane Potion."

Smethwyck nodded. "That's the essence of the matter, madam."

"So Mr. Black will have to engineer a mysterious disappearance three or four days out of every month, at a minimum. Most inconveniently, the full moons doesn't necessarily fall on the week-end."

Bill said, "Then there's the matter of the previous policy of the Auror Department on Muggle werewolves. That needs to be overturned. Otherwise, we'll have to expose it …"

Hermione wasn't clear on which side of the border he meant for that revelation. She added, feeling cynical, "Well, we've been lucky. The werewolves attacked someone wealthy and well-connected. The grisly death of a banker in the City of London would have made the papers, at a minimum."

Healer Derwent said, "There is another complication, practical and perhaps political. The Aurors in Manchester had help. When they arrived to deal with the werewolf pack there, someone had Apparated to a defensible position in the understructure of a bridge and was holding off the pack quite competently. It's an interesting question if the Aurors were rescuers, or reinforcements." She conjured a parchment file and consulted it, "She'd Stunned four or five of them by the time that the Aurors arrived on the scene.

"It transpires that the girl has been living rough for at least six months, pretending to be a Muggle. When she refused to identify herself, the Aurors took her into custody along with the werewolves." Derwent looked down again briefly to consult the report. "Twelve werewolves in all."

Hermione couldn't restrain herself. "Where is she? What did they do to her?"

"She is under my care in Spell Damage." Derwent lowered her voice. "Not medically appropriate, of course, but probably the safest place for her, under the circumstances. I think we should continue this conversation in a more confidential setting." She flicked her wand, and the noises from the hall ceased as if someone had shut off the sound.

Nigel Black couldn't hear them either, from the look she glimpsed on his face—incomprehension and surly annoyance.

"I had my suspicions as to who she might be. Professor Slughorn came down from Hogwarts. He spoke with the patient and calmed her so that he could give her the necessary nutritive Potions. I also left it to him to administer Dreamless Sleep, following the interview."

Derwent glanced around at the assembly before continuing. "Her testimony is far from reassuring. The remnants of the Death Eaters and the Snatchers are rallying into something that may be a threat-if not immediately, then in the future, by virtue of their fear of reprisal, both from war victims and from wizarding locals who treat strangers as likely Death Eaters. The patient was a Half-blood with connections to some of Voldemort's auxiliaries at Hogwarts. Nonetheless, she had assisted Professor Slughorn with the evacuation of underage students and the coordination of incoming auxiliaries at the Hog's Head preparatory to the Battle of Hogwarts."

"If she was on the right side in the war, why didn't she come forward?" As soon as the question was out of her mouth, Hermione realized how naïve it sounded.

"She didn't feel safe. They've already tried to kill her once. In Hogsmeade, six or seven months ago. The day you and Mr. Longbottom rescued Draco Malfoy. She's been on the run since then."

"I know her, then." Another mystery had unraveled. "Professor Slughorn talked to me about having her noted for a posthumous commendation, only he wasn't sure that she was dead. It's Millicent Bulstrode, isn't it?"

Derwent nodded. "Quite a clever girl, Miss Bulstrode. She's survived at least six lunar cycles on the werewolves' own territory, and hasn't been turned. And she knows quite a bit about their haunts, which might simplify some aspects of our _domestic_ situation with the werewolf problem."

Hermione already knew that the _foreign_ situation would require a day-long seminar all on its own. Domestically, well … Fleur, Padma and Seamus stood inside the enclosure around Nigel's bed, with drawn wands.

Mrs. Finch-Fletchley said, "So what are the demands we propose to lay before Minister Shacklebolt? And how might we make sure that they are satisfied?" Hermione smiled in spite of herself:s exactly how she would have asked the question.

Andromed exchanged a glance with Boudicca Derwent, then turned to Justin and Mrs. Finch-Fletchley. "Would you happen to have _social contacts_ with the Muggle Minister?"

Mrs. Finch-Fletchley nodded with a slight smile. Andromeda's answering smile made Hermione shivers at the momentary glimpse of Bellatrix, who would have been even scarier if she'd been sane.

"Side channels," Mrs. Finch-Fletchley said. "I think I understand. Minister Shacklebolt will not be the sole conduit for information."

Now Andromeda had the look of a well-fed tiger. "And he'll know it, too, and watch his step."

"And not a breath of it will be official, will it?" Oh yes, the grownups were very much on the case. Hermione realized that she had not properly appreciated the virtues of Slytherin witches. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Pansy Parkinson was by no means the whole picture.

Justin said, "That means we'll need our own intelligence network. He's not precisely restraining the Aurors-or they're a power unto themselves."

"None of us who were _classified_ as Muggle-born got invitations." Again Dean flashed that disconcerting, unhumorous grin, all teeth and no answering light in the eyes. "I was the test case. When they decided I was Half-blood, there was an invitation."

Fleur said, "Shacklebolt's a decent man, but he doesn't have the power." She absently rolled the grip of her wand, tapping on it as if beating time to an unheard song. "On the other hand, we have auxiliaries... Not all of the old Order or the Defense Association belongs to the Ministry." She smiled, as grimly as Dean. "A balance of powers."

Mrs. Finch-Fletchley said, "As a reasonable first draft of our demands, then: no more killing of Muggle werewolves; the direct repeal of the Umbridge legislation." The assembly nodded. "The Foundation will be assimilating and rehabilitating multiple cohorts of adolescent werewolves, and they will need education and training, jobs, and respectable positions; otherwise, they'll simply lapse for the sake of survival …"

"And then Greyback will have won," Lavender said, "and that's not something I want to see."

Justin said, "Brewing and distribution of Wolfsbane Potion will be both financed and controlled by the Foundation, with the new St. Mungo's lycanthropy ward as the distribution point." Hermione recognized some of the points from her report. Yes, they had thought it all out, and the crisis had resolved quite neatly into an opportunity.

Justin continued. "Professor Slughorn has been teaching the Wolfsbane Potion production process to the NEWTs revision group at Hogwarts. I understand that there are several promising leads for the Potions production at full-moon under the current plan. Slughorn is looking for a permanent assistant."

He paused, plainly for dramatic effect. "The choice of that person will depend upon the outcome of the NEWTs."

So, Hermione thought, there might be more than one prospect for her after all.

ooo

Kingsley arrived shortly thereafter, and a select group of the organizers of the Remus Lupin Foundation disappeared into the meeting with him: Andromeda Tonks, Bill Weasley, Justin Finch-Fletchley (as deputy to his mother, Hermione suspected), along with Healers Derwent and Smethwyck. In their absence, Hermione found herself falling asleep—not good—so she went to the visitors' tea room, to see if something revivifying might be obtained there…

… and returned to find the company assembled outside Nigel Black's makeshift hospital room. The Minister had acceded to their demands.

"Nothing much he can do," Bill Weasley said.

_And he's not the real power,_ Hermione thought, but didn't say.

"The patient wishes to speak with you," said Healer Smethwyck.

"Oh very well." Better to have it over with. Just so that everyone would be quite clear on the point, she said to Andromeda, "Only out of duty. I am _not_ some angel of mercy." She hadn't fancied the role with Draco, and she liked even less the notion that Nigel might think himself entitled to her time.

Seamus and Padma moved to the corners of the room, nodding toward the chairs by the bedside. Hermione sat in one chair, Andromeda in the other.

"Mr. Black," she said, with as formal a manner as she could assume. Never mind the git had tried to force her, and then provided additional complication.

Nigel Black turned to stare at her.

"Miss Granger." He smirked, which didn't bode well. "I suppose I ought to admit that you were right. Or rather that your little paramour was, though I didn't quite know what he meant by _your own kind."_

Paramour, no, not quite the right word. Rather too fancy, she thought, and then knew she was sleep-deprived, because semantic niceties ought not to be the first thing to come to mind.

"And your _influential connections_ include my schoolmate. So much for _droit du seigneur,_ eh?" She heard the weird tinny laugh before she realized it was her own. "It's a small world, isn't it, Nigel Black?" She would have to stop laughing, of course, but the absurdity wouldn't let her go. "Nigel _Black._ Oh gods, Nigel sodding Black. You don't know how many times I bit my tongue to avoid asking you if you were related to _that_ Black family."

Everybody really was everybody else's cousin, and it wasn't only the wizarding world. In fiction, well, after 1918 at any rate, coincidences like this wouldn't be permitted. She covered her face, in the hopes of getting the disembodied tickle of laughter under control. No, it wasn't funny, and Nigel wasn't funny, no, but the Black Family Tree seemed to have metastasized into her _real _life, the incognito on the other side of the border, like a dream exploding into waking reality.

But the matter at hand needed to be seen to, so she pulled herself together. "And let me tell you for the last time, Draco Malfoy is not my _paramour._" (What in fact he was, well, that she'd think out when she had some leisure. But, really—_paramour?_ She didn't have Nigel down as a fan of romance novels.) "Nor, for that matter, does he have any aspirations to the Turner Prize. Though I will agree with you that he has one of the ugliest tattoos in the British Isles."

Of course, there were people at least as talentless as Draco who had aspirations to artistic fame… no, back to the subject at hand, she admonished herself.

Nigel glared at her, most satisfactorily, and she had an unexpected frisson of fellow-feeling with Draco. There _was_ a certain pleasure to annoying people she hated. She hoped it wouldn't prove habit-forming. She giggled, and put her hand over her mouth rather too late. It sounded like Lavender, well, the Lavender who had courted Won-Won. "And I'm a poor excuse for an angel of mercy, but you'll have to excuse me, because I had maybe four hours of sleep last night." She sat back in the chair, hugging herself.

Andromeda Tonks said in a crisp, magisterial tone, "Mr. Black, I believe. You'll excuse Miss Granger, I trust. She is rather exhausted. This business has led us all a merry chase." _She sounds like my mother, _Hermione thought, _all dispatch and common sense, _but then Andromeda spoiled it by glowering at her like Bellatrix resurrected.

Nigel turned to Andromeda. "Who are you? Are you one of those Lupin Foundation people?"

"Yes, in fact. Andromeda Black Tonks, at your service." She paused and then added, "Honorary president of the Foundation, but more to the point..."

"A possible connection on _this side of the border,"_ he said. "They've interrogated me already about the supposed property on Grimmauld Place. You're a witch."

"Yes," Andromeda replied. "As is everyone here. The ones who aren't wizards, that is."

Slytherins were so absurdly _theatrical,_ Hermione thought. Even the common-sensical ones.

ooo

"Oh yes, Justin had his whole little speech for me," Nigel said to Andromeda. His lip curled, and he continued, in a sing-song parody of Justin's voice, "'So, old chap, you've fallen victim to a _treatable chronic condition,' - _never mind I'm a _werewolf _now – 'and I'm here to tell you all about the _resources_ for your new life.' Nigel jerked his head toward Hermione, "And if it hadn't been for _her,_ I wouldn't be here at all."

Nigel Black, would-be rapist, whom she'd rescued because, well, that's what one _did,_ just as one rescued Draco Malfoy … Hermione never had understood the expression _to see red, _until now. Red-black, a sort of flashing darkness.

When her vision cleared, she was digging the tip of her wand into the flesh under his jaw. Words were inadequate, weapons for that matter … nothing would make an impression on that ironclad impunity, would it? Blowing his head off wouldn't teach him a bloody thing, because he'd be smugly oblivious up to the very last. Nonetheless, she would endeavor to explain …

"You absolute _wanker,"_ she said. "You presumptuous little Muggle _fucker. _You wouldn't be here because you'd be _dead._ And you wouldn't have been outside anyway if you hadn't been _harassing_ me for the last six months. No, Nigel Black doesn't take no for an answer. Nigel has a bet with his mates about how long it's going to take to bed the new girl... the bloody _exotic._ Nigel can't leave it alone, can he? 'You might want to reconsider. I'm rather better connected than you might suspect.' Yes, Nigel, I know _now_ that Justin's father is one of the bank directors, and no, I didn't use that connection to get the job. I got it on _ability,_ which is something _your lot_ don't understand. Not you, and not your cousin, Draco sodding Malfoy." She added, "Whom, I might add, I've soundly thrashed in class marks _every year_ we were in school."

Nigel's mouth dropped open and his eyes widened. Finally, _finally_ a reaction. Because if that smug smirk had remained on his face, she might just have removed his face to spare herself the provocation.

"Oh yes, that's what it means, belonging to the House of Black. Draco Malfoy's mother is Narcissa Black. Madam Tonks is his _aunt."_ The look of horror on his face set her off laughing again. Nigel winced. Yes, she'd driven the wand-tip deeper. Well, let him get a taste of that thorn-in-the-flesh sensation. Turnabout was fair play.

A hand closed on her wrist, cool and competent and long-fingered. Andromeda was leaning across the bed, trying to make eye contact. "Hermione, _your wand."_ It wasn't so much the physical restraint as the steady, carefully neutral tone that brought her back. Steadying the maniac, talking down the madwoman with the gun … well, yes, a wand was a deadly weapon, wasn't it, even absent _Avada. _Nigel was staring up at her, his head tilted back and his body tense, as if he were trying to back away, his eyes open in terror, and yes, she was awash in adrenalin because she could count the pale-brown lashes and watch the glitter of tears in the pink ducts, watch them catch on the lip of his lower eyelid, notice the bloodshot whites (no, he hadn't had a good night's sleep either).

_She_ was the dangerous character in the picture, even though _he_ was the one who'd been stalking her for months …

She shivered and pocketed the wand. Yes, it did require an effort of will not to kill him, but he was a Muggle, and she was a witch, and really it wouldn't be sporting. Not that he had been sporting, or anything like it, when he'd thought he had the advantage. And of course Andromeda would side with him, because he was a relative, and the Purebloods did stick together.

"As if I hadn't enough trouble, with _everything else,_ I have to put up with _this lot." _No, there was trouble enough without Nigel Black in the picture. And there were things bothering her about that picture. She gave him one last glare, because he needed it.

What was the picture, anyway? Five long steps and she'd run out of thinking room, so she turned.

"Did it occur to you that I might be warning you off for reasons other than your very unattractive persistence?"

Not entirely true, but something was coming clear, and she might reason her way toward it ...

Nigel actually looked chastened, or surprised. "No."

"In this world, _my lad,_ I am reckoned mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Andromeda seemed to be suppressing the urge to smirk; well, she _had _just compared herself to Lord Byron. "It may well be you'd be safe and sound if you'd kept well away, because those werewolves might not have been there by coincidence."

Wild surmise, then –

"Dolores Umbridge."

Or not so wild, if the same thought had occurred to Andromeda Tonks, Pureblood insider.

"She's on house arrest," Hermione said, watching Andromeda's reaction now, rather than Nigel's, "but the War Crimes Commission is packed with her protégés, not to mention the Sentient Beings committee. It has her signature, though: send monsters after those you don't like, and make sure that it's on the other side of the border. Though given Umbridge's views on the Werewolf Problem, it would be ironic..."

Andromeda said, "I think we might want to talk to Kingsley again. _In private,"_ she said, with a nod toward Nigel, who was listening intently. Andromeda turned to Nigel, with the blazing look of Bellatrix, and Hermione was pleased to see him flinch for a moment. "However, I cannot say that I'm pleased at what I've seen and heard of your conduct toward Miss Granger."

Nigel took a breath, as if to begin speaking, and Andromeda cut him off. "I think it best you add nothing to this. The point of conducting oneself always as a gentleman is that one need have no regrets when discovering that someone's rank is rather _higher_ than one had assumed."

Hermione mentally awarded a few hundred points to Andromeda, even if she'd posed the matter in thoroughly aristocratic terms.

"Who _is_ she, exactly? I've gathered she's... rather a big noise on this side of the border."

Andromeda narrowed her eyes at Nigel for a split second, and then looked weary. _A very slow learner,_ Hermione translated that look. "Well, she's a rising young star in our Ministry, and, as she's pointed out, she was quite a satisfactory scholar at Hogwarts."

Nigel blinked. So now she had his attention. "Hogwarts. That's the school for which Justin turned down Eton."

"Yes. Hogwarts is by far the best school in Britain, on our side of the border." Andromeda cleared her throat, by way of transition. "But that's all rather beside the main point. Hermione Granger is a Knight of the Order of Merlin, First Class, for conspicuous services to wizarding Britain in the late war. Services without which you, your family, and your world would be dead by now, or living in _rather reduced circumstances."_

Well, she hadn't expected _that._ Nor had she put the problem in exactly those terms; since the war, she'd been rather too busy to spend much time contemplating her CV.

Nigel looked at Andromeda – well, plainly he wasn't tracking _that_. It would have to be put in terms he'd understand.

Hermione said, "The losing side considered themselves the wizard Herrenvolk, and their leader was rather a student of Hitler. He was reared on your side of the border, and he had an undying hatred of Muggles-that would be non-magical folk."

"So we were like the Jews in his scheme?"

"No, in Tom Riddle's scheme, the _Muggle-born_ were like the Jews. Racial inferiors have to belong to the same _species._ The Muggles were more like cattle. Something to be kept _in its place_ and made useful."

Nigel frowned. "So you stopped this Riddle chap." Ah, good, progress was being made.

"Not me alone. There was quite a resistance. We did a crucial bit, that's all. You met Ron..."

"The ginger lout?"

Patience, she reminded herself. Hexing him would have no pedagogical value, as six years of hexes and jinxes had made no impression on his cousin Draco.

"I'll remind you he had something to do with your being alive to say snide things about him." She sighed. "And then there was Harry." She yawned. This was going to take far longer than anticipated, and she was really not up to a recap of the entire Second War with Voldemort. "And you've met Neville."

"The hefty northern boy." A sneer (reflex, that must be), and then he said, "So who are the other two?"

Hermione thought about her bed, well, any of the available horizontal surfaces on which it might be possible to snatch a few hours' rest.

"The black boy and the airy-fairy blonde. The ones who were just here. I've seen you with them in London. Now _she_ looks like a witch, but I thought she was just an art student."

"Luna and Dean, and they _are_ art students." No, someone else was going to have to take over the task of explaining it all to Nigel. "I'm tired, and the story is tiresome. Anybody here could tell you..."

"So is he your boyfriend?"

"He?"

"Well, whichever of them. The little blond or the hefty one or the black one..."

"You remind me of Rita Skeeter, did you know that? As it happens, Draco, _your cousin,_ was on the other side, so I'd watch your step with him." (Never mind that was a completely empty threat just now.) "His father tortured your kind for fun. Dean is a friend of mine, and as for Neville..."

She walked back to the bed, and kept her hand away from the wand holster with a physical effort. "Neville Longbottom is a good fifty times the man you are, and that's _not_ counting magic into it. So if you were thinking to compete with him... don't. Because you can't win."

She turned on her heel. Andromeda was watching her, with a carefully expressionless face. She said, "I am _exhausted_ and I would sell my soul for a good ten hours' sleep. So I'm going home now, before any devils show up to strike a bargain." She stared very hard at Nigel, as if that might drill the point – some point – into his thick head.

And then her eyes were adjusting to the gloom, as crockery rattled on the high shelves in the kitchen of Longbottom House. She had taken out her wand, turned in a circle, and Apparated, before she'd half thought about it. And to judge from the aftershock, her form wasn't up to Augusta's. She stared as the faint tattoo of earthenware on wooden shelves settled down into silence.

Well. Nigel had been altogether more than she was prepared to deal with in her current state.

Neville did rather have a point about her state of exhaustion, though there were things to be done before she could rest with a good conscience.

She holstered her wand and walked out of the kitchen. Everyone seemed to have separated the house on some errand. No one was in the grand dining room, and the hall stood empty as well. Then there was the front room.

She saw a glimpse of familiar blond hair, and turned… to see Draco lying asleep on the antique horsehair couch, an article of furniture she frankly despised because it summed up the clammy chill of the Victorian era in one smug heavy piece of furniture.

His hair was spread out on the shiny black surface, catching on the rough nap, but he wasn't sleeping alone. There was a little face nestled on his arm, with blue hair gently rolling into violet, like a gas flame set on low.

Teddy Lupin. And he had fallen asleep in Draco's arms, the two of them asleep together on the couch… well, yes, Andromeda must have had Teddy with her this morning, but she didn't remember.

She looked up to see Neville place a finger in front of his lips, and beckon her closer. "What's that?" she mouthed, indicating the two sleepers on the sofa.

"Just what it looks," he whispered. "Teddy wore him out." He drew her into the hall. "It was a sight to see, the two of them down on all fours chasing each other." Yes, there were faint dusty patches on Draco's robes, somewhere in the neighborhood of his knees.

"So the cousins have hit it off, then." Neville nodded. Hermione thought about it, then: if Andromeda was standing _in loco parentis_ then Teddy would be something of a very much younger brother to Draco…

"I watched him, of course," Neville said. "But his behavior was exemplary." There was a whoosh in the kitchen… someone coming through the Floo. The elf materialized by the sofa and waved them out of the room. "Gran must be back," Neville said. "She had some errand or other in London after luncheon, she said."

Augusta was dusting herself off as they walked into the kitchen. "Ah, good to see you, lass," she said. ."Just the moment. Might we step into the study?"

Hermione followed, as Augusta took off the vulture hat and passing the wand over it. "Floo. Still a nuisance." She said, "though not as bad as it was once.."

They walked down the hall. "So you were down to London this afternoon." Hermione nodded.

"St. Mungo's, with Andromeda."

"Aye," Augusta said, and the nod and grim set of the mouth told her that she was probably in on it. "A dire business, that. I've been to London, myself, on a bit of business." She closed the door of the study, and waved Hermione to a chair.

ooo

"Nothing to be done about the St. Mungo's business then?"

Hermione shook her head. She was still shaking a bit at the thought that she'd lost her temper with Nigel… though actually it was refreshing to be the difficult one. At least this time it hadn't been the Killing Curse, or inadvertent weather-working, only a murderous red haze of a thoroughly Mugglish kind. Yes. All to the good. Only it probably was best she not get into detail with Augusta.

"Then it's time we had a proper chat about the work you did on that house," Augusta said, settling herself in the chair before the great roll-top desk. To Hermione's carefully blank look, she added, "Your parents' house."

No, Augusta hadn't missed Hermione's sangfroid at Grimmauld Place, and she'd plainly made some investigations of her own.

Hermione decided that since the secret was out, she might as well be perfectly unashamed. She wasn't skulking when she did the work in the first place.

"The models are Malfoy Manor and Spinner's End, and yes, I tested using the blood-homunculi method as you did in your Pensieve depositions."

"There were some very clever adaptations to the problem of a magical emplacement in a Muggle district. I see you borrowed some of Snape's solutions, but adjusted the level of force."

"I didn't suppose I was going to be dealing with Death Eaters who already knew where I lived." She was feeling a little better now that they were having a technical consultation. "Contrary to what _some people_ think, I don't hit everything with five times the firepower needed."

"That would be our Neville's opinion," Augusta said complacently, "and I believe young Draco concurs as well. I bear in mind that was wartime, though I wouldn't fancy making an enemy of you. You did make one mistake, though. You accepted a gift from the Malfoys."

Her eagle's smile made Hermione's blood run cold.

"I don't know why this is relevant, but that broom was a loan."

"I'm not speaking of Draco, but his family's defense architect. Circa 1625, I believe. Very fine work, and I don't wonder you thought it worth borrowing, but it has certain assumptions built in." She gave Hermione a _look_, all eyes and no smile. "You should count yourself lucky that you gave yourself away. Neville tells me you meant your parents to live there."

The next sentence cleared up the difficulty.

"It would have killed them as soon as they crossed the outer perimeter. The Squib problem, you know. That's the Old Pureblood solution: kill them by age three and just to be safe, build your perimeter defenses to kill non-magical members of the Family."

Hermione felt her eyes widening involuntarily.

Augusta leaned in. "You were there for the Decommissioning at the Manor, but you didn't see all of it. It's bound to the blood, you know, and the Heads of the Family. And the _children_ of the family."

Hermione nodded._ Fidelius_ permitted that, at least.

"We'll have a project then, you and I. Just as soon as you've had a bite of to eat and a good night's rest." She turned to Hermione. "You've watched one Decommissioning. Now you'll do that."

"But I need defenses on that house."

"I wasn't claiming otherwise. There are other ways to accomplish that. We'll build new defenses directly we've Decommissioned the old ones." She turned to the clock. "Tomorrow, then."

Hermione nodded. Nothing yet on the agenda, except for the research for the Banishing project. Well, that would be easily enough accomplished. She resisted the urge to finger the time-turner on its chain, under the layers of her clothes. It was enough to know that it was there.

"Bright and early, lass," Augusta said.

There was work to be done before she went to her parents' house tomorrow. Yes. There would be hours to be spent on that task. The second Decommissioning in as many months… how many? well, the one at Malfoy Manor had been October, yes, that was before Halloween, and now scarcely past New Year's, well, tomorrow was the second of January. Yes. Dates were tricky things; it all seemed quite different.

Decommissioning was going to take a good piece of the day, that much she knew. She'd planted those defenses deep and solid, with quite the same intent as the architects whom she had imitated: those wards, those tricks and traps and deadfalls, would endure well beyond her lifetime and the gates of hell would not prevail against them. Or the Death Eaters, or the Ministry, or any other Power.

Other Powers, well other Powers included the Dementors, and there was little enough time for that. She yawned, and Augusta smiled faintly.

"Tomorrow morning, then."

ooo

When she emerged from Augusta's study, she met Neville carrying Teddy, who was wriggling in his arms and looking about with a lively air. "Draco's still asleep," he said by way of explanation.

"So they got on."

"Oh yes. Surprised me, frankly." Teddy snuggled into Neville's arms and nestled his face on that strong chest. Hermione remembered leaning back against Neville… oh that summer, hadn't it been? Yes. The Quidditch game where she'd gotten her nose broken, and Neville had repaired it. Blue sky, and wavery trees seen through tears, and … that solid, well-cushioned surface behind her, a warm wall against the world. Merely warm, rather than… fiery. But even then there had been pleasure in it.

That was for later. For now, there was work awaiting her elsewhere, in London.

She must not have been sufficiently subtle in her turn to the terrace, for he said, "Where are you going?"

"I have things to do before tomorrow."

"What sort of things?"

"You know what sort of things. I don't have my books here."

Nothing spoken to say which ones she meant. She didn't carry the Durmstrang volumes with her… well, she had been on the move for simply days, and hadn't had a chance to go back home. She needed those books, though. She should have scooped them up when they'd been at the house on New Year's Eve, days ago. No, Only last night. It wasn't the second of January but the first. Still New Year's Day. The calendar got confused…

"No," he said. Teddy looked at her, his eyes wolf-amber. "No. You've been wearing yourself out."

"There's work to be done."

"If you have a time-turner, why don't you use it for extra sleep?" She looked at him. "You know perfectly well you'll be away somewhere reading. And if you go back to Hogwarts, you'll be up all night, and if you go to your parents' house…"

He knew perfectly well what she'd been about there.

And those books weren't with her because they were contraband. No one had said anything about forbidden lore, but she knew the Restricted Section at Hogwarts, and those books weren't in it.

He reached across and stroked her cheek, and then Teddy tugged at his sleeve, and she thought that it was very difficult indeed to be seductive while carrying a toddler. "Neville, I have to work on those things. No one else is doing it." She said, "And if I succeed, I'll get free of the Goblins. Everything depends on this. Everything."

"One night won't make that much difference."

"Yes it will." It was like arguing with Harry and Ron when they were determined to be slack. "No. Every hour counts, now-" she stopped. "And I think those werewolves might have been sent on purpose. Odd, wasn't it, seven adolescent werewolves turning up just where I happened to be seeing in the New Year…"

"Someone else knows you have a time-turner." He was looking at her now, and absently tousling Teddy's hair. "And they're watching you."

"All the more reason," she said. "I'm running out of time. I have to finish this. If I don't…" No, she wasn't going to think about that.

Augusta peered out of the study. No doubt they'd raised their voices… well, she had.

The elf materialized with at the tea service. Ah yes, not quite as strong as coffee, but that would do, and it was hot besides.

Augusta said, "Your bed's ready upstairs, when you've finished your work." And then she closed the door of the study.

Neville sat down with her, and the teapot poured her a cup and Neville foiled Teddy's grab for the plate of biscuits. Bright boy, he knew exactly what those were. She nibbled one. Chocolate, dense and rich, with a hint of coconut…

… thanks to which she didn't quite recognize the refreshing overtone in the tea until she had drunk a whole cup. Piney, like rosemary… Dreamless Sleep. Which of the Slytherins in the house had managed that, she could guess…

The night ocean swallowed her.

ooo

**Author's note:** "Mad, bad and dangerous to know": Lady Caroline Lamb on Lord Byron.


	63. Chapter 63

******Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**Saturday 2 January 1999**

A long day.

No, what I meant to write: a long day, without benefit of time-turner. Not at all the same thing. There's nothing to attend at the Ministry; the whole business is out of my hands. As for my job at the bank… Nigel has done for that, no doubt. At any rate, things have gotten complicated enough that there's likely no chance I can go back, given what got captured on those surveillance cameras at the hotel.

Looked at the timetable just now, the list of dates that had been written out before we began: the date for the delivery of the indictments. Tomorrow. Tired as I am, I will have to talk to Neville. Yes.

But that's another affair entirely. Yes.

A long day, without benefit of time-turner.

It began …

… Oh it began, in darkness. I didn't know where I was, nor what day it was, and my first act was to grab for the wand—yes, still in its holster. Except I was in my nightclothes, and in bed. In bed where?

In the dark, behind muffling curtains.

There was one moment of no memory at all. A common side-effect of Dreamless Sleep. Yes. She dosed me with Dreamless Sleep. Spiked the tea.

We would have to have words about that.

Yes.

Then the elf materialized out of the darkness—and it's spooky, that creature, and no whit less powerful than the mistress of the house it shares. I could feel that dark energy on my skin…

So I washed, and dressed, and came down to breakfast, a repast that Augusta Longbottom and I were sharing, at the great formal table, absent everyone else in the household.

ooo

The house kept its counsel, as breakfast silently materialized on the center of the table. Coffee for me, strong and aromatic; tea for Augusta. Substantial fare, piping hot… which only reminded me how cold it would be outside.

"Eat up, lass," Augusta admonished me, although I was doing a fine job of that already. I was hungry. Yes. I was hungry and felt a bit as if I had fallen down stairs…

Well, the last days have been brutal.

The last days have been too much.

Nonetheless, one soldiers on.

ooo

It wasn't until after breakfast that I got a good look at the clock. Five o'clock. Five o'clock in the morning in the dead of winter isn't much different from midnight, for darkness.

"We'll need every hour of it," Augusta said, gathering up her long black cloak. "That's quite a fortress you've built." She raised an eyebrow. "Sight unseen, not the sort of place I'd go to Decommission without heavy reinforcements." Once more that dragon's smile, and then she added, "It's rare one has the company of the original architect. At least absent Necromancy."

Well, that was a good thing, too. There were some nice traps I'd built especially for someone who recognized either of the originals from which I was working. I had to assume that anyone who was trying those defenses knew who I was. There are no magical emplacements between my parents' house and the Ministry for Magic, nor is there any sizable wizarding enclave, not even a handful of families, in the vicinity.

If anyone were looking at that house with a suspicious eye, they would already know that Hermione Granger lived there.

And they'd know that I was on the War Crimes Commission, because everyone knows that. It's been mentioned in the _Prophet_.

And so they'd know that I had charge of the archives, and the memories of the Decommissioning of Malfoy Manor, and the particulars of Spinner's End.

So I built some little surprises, where the usual arrangements are inverted. In particular, three of the four gates in the inmost barrier aren't gates at all. If this truly were architecture, those gates would be pits—something that looks like a gate, with a precipitous drop behind it.

Of course, the analogies aren't exact… only insofar as attempted entry will get any intruder _very dead indeed,_ as they say in the hard-boiled detective stories.

ooo

The first step took place at Augusta's table, once the breakfast things had faded back into the darkness.

She summoned a model of my parents' house, translucent and faintly glowing, and drew on it with her wand the defense lines she had observed from the outermost barrier.

Then she sat back in her chair, very much like a professor at a doctoral defense.

There was nothing to correct in her mapping of the outer perimeter—and that was by design. Anyone who could get through that shouldn't be warned too soon that things were not as they seemed. If it were enough to stop them, fine—then they were no worse than the enemies anticipated by the Malfoys or by Severus Snape.

But if they chanced to get through…

I diagrammed the next barrier, and the one within.

Augusta raised an eyebrow once or twice.

I couldn't suppress a smile. That was as good as being awarded points.

Two perimeters lay between the property line and the house proper. Then there were the wards subdividing the interior into zones. I had designed them to permit me to Apparate in, but no one else. So the barriers had to be lowered by me, or someone of the Blood. If I didn't lower them, I would be safe but the intruder would be eaten by the house.

Not to put too fine a point on it.

ooo

Yes, and I had a reputation for being the sort of swot who recites the textbook verbatim. The outer perimeter, then, was an exact copy of the outer perimeter of Spinner's End, because it had to accommodate the pavement and street and other urban inconveniences.

The next perimeter was copied, verbatim, from Malfoy Manor.

After that, things got interesting.

They'd think they were safe home, and relax their guard. They would think I had copied the defenses slavishly…

… Which I hadn't.

If they got as far as the front door, everything was designed to entice them in, as if I'd gotten sloppy and overconfident, thinking nobody would ever get this far.

If one of the three false gates in the innermost barrier didn't get them, then the deadly mechanism of the house would. Neville and Draco had both recognized it immediately; magic at that level all but raises the hair, like impending lightning. You can feel it.

I wonder if Muggles could feel it…

… No, Muggles, any Muggles, even but especially those of my blood, would be long dead by that point. Yes. That was the point of this whole expedition.

Though as Augusta raised a single eyebrow, or narrowed her eyes, or frowned, I couldn't help but understand the allure of the villain's monologue. Yes, I had been dead clever, clever and deadly both, and it really was quite elegant. The whole thing turned on a nice combination of deadly force, proven examples, and a stereotypical notion of how my mind works, which I'm quite happy to humor long enough to lure an enemy to his or her doom.

Yes, I was insulted by Snape's estimate of me, but it's best that enemies not really know what you're capable of.

Because anybody getting that far would intend nothing less than my death. Any witch or wizard passing that barrier on the outside would know it for what it was, a wall posted _No admittance! Danger!, _and so forth, and would keep well away.

At the end, Augusta sat silent, watching the play of glowing lines on the translucent shell of my parents' house, color-coded for each layer of perimeter.

She looked at me, her dark eyes unreadable in the dim candlelight. She levitated the model, turned it slowly in the darkness between us, as the green and blue and red and violet and gold lit up her face.

"Aye, lass," she said. "It's a shame there's so little call for your sort of touch. You've the gift in earnest."

And then she added, in a rather different tone, that fat times for the defense architects were less than salutary for the general population.

ooo

We spent quite some time working out the strategy for taking the whole thing down in layers. I hadn't anticipated that part, just as I had not thought out how I was going to reverse the memory charm on my parents. In the heat of battle, it had seemed much more important to build solid, defensible, deadly work.

The perimeters weren't independent; they talked to each other; as soon as one fell, it would trip a warning to the next. That was standard, of course, but I'd added to it; they communicated under other conditions, as well, rather like one subroutine calling another.

And as I considered how to dismantle it all, rapidly it got more complicated than was really easy to think about.

ooo

After an hour or so of tweaking and pulling at threads on the model, Augusta said, "If you had been wondering what the Muggle-borns brought to us by way of gifts, this is it."

"Energy and hard work. We don't take anything for granted."

"Not only that." She considered the skein of glowing lines, interwoven and throwing new connections across every time her wand touched them, as if an invisible spider were weaving a web. "New metaphors. And there's nothing so powerful as a metaphor."

I nodded. I already knew about that from my middling-fair hacking. The designer might have one view of what a bit of software did, but if you looked at it coldly, you could think of new things to do with it… some of which let the door open.

She said, "Magic is the boundary between word and world."

"But you have to be careful of your assumptions." Well, no different from programming there. She indicated the model. "Now, under certain circumstances, we could do the work from here."

I shook my head. "No, I anchored the defenses."

She waited for me to speak.

"Pretty much the way the Malfoys anchored theirs."

The pause grew uncomfortably long.

"It's a small property. It didn't take more than a few deciliters of blood."

"Your own." I nodded. Whose else was I going to use?

"Well, that gives us a foothold, then. You're the center of the defenses." She looked at me. "Has anyone ever tried the defenses?"

"Not that I'm aware."

"You'd have known if they did." She said, "Especially given whose design you chose for your outer perimeter. Not something you can sleep through. Though I don't fancy he slept much."

No, I don't suppose that Severus Snape was a man of long and peaceful slumbers… unless you count death.

"So much as tickle that wall in a significant way and you'd be awake in a hurry."

That part I hadn't had tested. There are things where you have to trust to the design, which means trusting the assumptions of the original designer. I'd already made one mistake by taking up the Malfoy design.

Unfortunately, from what I saw in the depositions, Snape was a man with nothing to lose — well, almost nothing.

"So this could be unpleasant."

"It won't be so painful that you can't think. That would rather defeat the purpose."

"So we cut the anchors." I indicated them on the translucent model floating in the pre-dawn darkness between us. "Four of them, aligned with the cardinal directions. They're buried in the garden."

She half-smiled. "Very traditional. That design goes back to the Egyptians."

"Suppose we do, then… cut the anchors." I hadn't run that particular scenario, because no one would ever be able to do that from the outside.

ooo

There is so much I didn't know.

Well, that's an understatement, isn't it? For one, I had no idea about how the apprenticeship works. I took it on, this whole task, with no notion that there might ever be anyone else in the picture.

Of course not.

I've been alone the whole time I've been here, without half knowing it. McGonagall gave me the time-turner the first time, oh gods, years and years ago. It wasn't only classes I used that for, but reading, just as now. Reading, and a few excursions… well, if only I'd known in advance how much I was going to need to know, I would have read more. I would have folded time over, over and over, to seize the day.

The more I learn, the more extensive becomes that terrifying boundary with the Unknown.

What I know, and what I think I know, and what I have no prayer of guessing because I didn't grow up in this world and I don't share its assumptions.

We were kneeling in the garden, digging for the anchors. I had sunk them deep, and they resisted being dug up. I could feel them evading me.

Augusta stood back, and took out a silver knife. Yes, the very sort carried by the Aurors.

"Usually the apprentice does this," she said. "Do you know the binding incantation?"

I shook my head.

"Then I'll teach you. But first, the blood. Advance payment."

Knife in one hand, wand in the other… and she cut her arm, the wand hand, and let the blood drip onto the ground, onto the soil above the first anchor.

Then she prompted me with the words, and she recited them after me. Green and violet light flared from under the soil… or maybe it didn't. Maybe only my eyes, our eyes, could see. Not that it mattered, because she'd added some layers of cloaking on top of the Muggle-repelling charms and the notice-me-not.

Cloaking, and something else. "We'll want to contain it, if something goes wrong. And not only on account of those spineless buggers in the Ministry." She made an ironic face, and quoted, "First, do no harm."

If only all mages took some version of the Hippocratic Oath… but of course not, because they don't think of themselves as part of the human race, and hence owe no duties to it.

More fallout of the Time of the Burning.

At least if this went up in the magical equivalent of a fireball, it wouldn't harm the Muggle neighbors.

"When you take an apprentice, traditionally that is, you bind them in blood to all of your works." She gestured toward toward the next anchor, widdershins, and we walked through the slush, now infiltrated with veins of violet light. "In the old days, the marriage rite was part of that. Your blood bound to mine, for all time." She said, "But it's blood the work wants. It doesn't care which is the master and which the apprentice." The glow from the ground underlit her face, under the black sky. Blacker than it ever would be in suburban London, but we were in a different place now, inside a shell of magic, reversed from the ordinary: glowing earth, dark sky.

She made a second cut, and let the blood drip onto the ground, and I recited the words of binding. (No, I'm not going to write them down here. No one has written them down, because they do not consent to be written down.)

Once more, and once again, we stood over the anchors and she fed them her blood.

Now she was bound into the magic of the defenses, as tightly as I was.

"It's very much easier if the master's alive," she said. "Usually we have to proceed by brute force." The smile was slight and carnivorous, with more than a passing resemblance to Dean's expression when he spoke of the Aurors and the Ministry.

"Especially when the defenses are as tangled as these." The Malfoys had been thinking _castle walls, _and Snape, _gun emplacements_. Given broomsticks and Thestrals and dragons, both of those places had air defenses, but neither really exploited the self-propagating, mutually communicating possibilities of programmed magic. All magic is instructions, of course—word and will—but the direct object is usually something in the physical world, rather than another instruction.

"And these are decentralized. There's no castle keep. Any part of the defenses can act as the center." I nodded. She'd gotten it in one.

"So we'll draw up the anchors, first, just as you suggested." I could see them glowing, down below, as if we stood on the surface of the water and they were sunk fathoms deep.

"All at once?"

She nodded. "And you're in the role of the master, so you begin."

A master who hadn't the faintest idea what she was doing, prompted by her apprentice…

I shouldn't have been disconcerted by the role reversal, but it was only now that I realized how much I didn't know.

"Now bind them together."

I closed my eyes, raised my wand to the center of the black sky overhead, and linked the energy of earth and sky.

It feels like weather-working, actually, on a very much smaller scale. Except it's not the weather systems of the planet I'm engaging, but this miniature system I've created in the rectangle bounded by the property-line.

The anchors glowed, and flared, and the light shot up into the sky, and down into the earth, so that we were surrounded by the violet pillars of the cardinal directions. Overhead, at the zenith, a blood-red star opened its rays, and the pillars leaned toward it…

And the sky went to ultramarine, as the violet pillars joined at the zenith.

A pyramid, yes.

She _had _said that the design went back to the Egyptians.

Now lit by this thoroughly artificial pre-dawn light—no stars in it at all, for the marker at the zenith had vanished—I turned to face north, my right hand to the east and my left to the west, all at Augusta's prompting. She turned to the west, commanding the north and south.

"It takes two to raise them all at once," she said.

And so we did, and the ground flared brilliant violet, so intense it hurt the eyes, until they reached the surface, and the ground went inky-black all at once.

ooo

I've tried three times to write down what happened next. It will not allow itself to be done. Of course not. It's the whole secret of bringing down defenses from the inside.

ooo

Under that artificial and unvarying sky, that glowed ultramarine, a flat glowing violet pre-dawn light, we paced the perimeters, untangled each from its anchor, did away with the linkage. The barrier that would contain the disaster, if such occurred, also served by way of temporary fortification.

There were a few bad moments, when cascades I had not anticipated set themselves up—well, it is not possible to predict every possible combination, and the defenses in their classic form are already a sort of automaton. I had just added another layer of interaction, enough to make them highly unpredictable.

It was a good thing that there were two of us, and one of us a master. One person couldn't keep watch on all of the cascades at once.

When the ultramarine sky gave way to the real one, it was long since dark.

Past dark. It was coming on to six o'clock when we Apparated back to Longbottom House.

ooo

No, it won't be written down, not specifically. But the rest of it wasn't too hard from there, and went more or less according to plan.

Which is to say, it took most of the day, counting the time to build the new defenses. Yes, the house still recognizes me, but I may identify those who may come and go, and to what extent. There are still zones of defense, and any part of the house may be designated the keep and defended against attackers.

It's just very much more in the modern style, and admits Muggle kinfolk.

And we did it all in quite enough time to get back to Lancashire for Augusta's meeting with Andromeda Tonks, _on another matter_. No, I wasn't to be let in on that secret, whatever it was. Grownups' business, her manner said.

So it's still the second of January as I write this. A long day without time-turner, and there's still my conversation with Neville.

ooo

Written very much later; I'm too tired to look at the clock. The time-turner tempts ... No, I cannot justify using it for this. Jot a few notes, and then to bed.

There was no point in dancing about the matter.

"Tomorrow is the third of January," I said.

Neville frowned.

I tried to say the next part, and my throat closed against it. So, the timeline was Most Secret as well.

"I have seen the indictments in draft."

He nodded.

"The draft is pretty appalling," I said, "so I'm assuming that the voices of reason are going to modify them somewhat…" Well, how much faith did I have that this was going to happen? Best to assume the worst. We'd know for certain in the morning.

"We said we'd stand by him," I said. "Starting New Year's Eve." How to circle back to the matter? Keep my intent out of it, recite the facts coldly.

"So they're being served tomorrow," he said. Good, I didn't have to spell that out.

"And Andromeda's coming here tonight. So we ought to talk to her."

He frowned again.

"She's the parent in the case. She has charge of Draco and…" the throat closed again. Apparently Draco's future sister isn't to be spoken of either. "She's already got Teddy. And she lost everybody. We're in the picture. She ought to know that."

"She was looking at us at breakfast yesterday. I think she knows."

"She knows there's something between us. But it's not a family thing."

"Gran said she didn't want to know…"

"She said we were to keep it out of the papers. I don't think Andromeda Tonks is chatting with Rita."

ooo

Neville nodded. "Then we'll go down directly." He took my hand, and we descended the staircase.

Augusta was standing in the kitchen, with an abstracted look, as the house elf concluded the last of the dinner preparations. She raised an eyebrow at Neville, who caught himself mid-flinch and said, "Might we have a word with Madam Tonks when she's here tonight?"

The eyebrow quirked.

"On a … delicate matter," I added, and felt my face grow hot.

"She's more than a few matters to attend tonight."

"It won't take long," I assured her.

"I'll send for you." We nodded and scuttled out, just in time to hear the whoosh of the Floo in the kitchen… and then Augusta's voice. "I've had a word with Molly Prewett's second." A pause. "Impudent puppy."

Andromeda sounded weary. "Who is it?"

"Felicitas Diggory." Whoever he might be, Neville's grandmother clearly didn't think much of him. "He'd done it for a lark, he said, because he thinks that Molly is a fanciable witch, and if it weren't for Arthur …"

Andromeda sighed. "I'd just like this business over and done. Set a place and a time, and I'll be there."

More than one matter to attend, if I understood _that _right. Neville tugged on my sleeve, and we went to sit in the formal parlor, assuming the appearance of good children who never would dream of eavesdropping on the news of someone else's duel.

Molly Weasley and Andromeda Tonks, it would appear. Andromeda had indeed found herself a Slytherin Old Girl to serve as her second.

A few minutes later, Augusta appeared in the doorway. We rose and followed her to the study, where Andromeda Tonks awaited us. Augusta gave us a significant look, which I translated as "Whatever it is, be quick about it," and departed, closing the door noiselessly behind her.

I cleared my throat, and it sounded unnaturally loud. I caught myself biting my lip. Next to me, Neville shuffled his feet, and then said by way of preamble, "It's about your nephew."

Andromeda frowned, then settled her face into neutral, expectant lines.

I said, "It wouldn't be any of our business, of course, except…"

Neville said, "We know he's rather difficult, and it doesn't seem that you should have to carry the whole thing, not with Teddy and all."

No flicker of recognition in that polite mask. I said, "We've promised him that we'll …" —how to explain it? Plain English would have to do—"we'll be there until the end, whether that's Azkaban or something else." How much would Fidelius permit me to tell? "I've seen the indictments. We'll be there tomorrow, when the Ministry serves them."

Oddly enough, it didn't close my throat this time, and I wondered exactly what fail-safes and branch-points Derwent had coded into it. Andromeda Tonks had some sort of special status, apparently.

I added, "As much for you as for him." Because if Andromeda stood _in loco parentis _to the offspring of Narcissa and Lucius, then she would need all the help she could get. There were two children in the picture and another on the way.

Neville said, "That means after the trials, as well."

"I don't know what the visitors' policy is at Azkaban, but if you want us…" No, that didn't bear thinking about, though I hadn't felt queasy about it until I began speaking, to Sirius Black's favorite cousin, who no doubt knew more about the matter than I did.

Neville says, "And during the trials… I've already spoken to Headmistress McGonagall."

"We will be there every day that we are able." What sort of ordeal the trial would be, I didn't know, but from the hints dropped by Derwent on the Azkaban visit… that the remains of Lestrange were being kept in reserve… no, that didn't bear thinking about.

"Is there something you mean to say?" Andromeda asked, as if venturing a secret password.

I leaned forward and thought of what I had seen, and tried to speak of it—and failed_._

Andromeda nodded, as if I had told her something.

Neville said, a bit stiffly, "Rita's version is unsavory, and of course I understand your hesitation_, _but the thing to know is that our intentions are honorable."

"Thank you, Neville." She inclined her head, closed her eyes briefly, then looked down at us again. Yes, down. She's nearly as tall as Neville. "I will be at Longbottom House at nine o'clock, unless I am required earlier."

She knows as much as I do. And now she knows I'm under Fidelius, and that I know more—and worse—than she does.

Neville added, "Of course, you're invited to breakfast."

ooo

Author's Note: Regular updates of _Amends_ and _Four O'Clock in the Morning_ are resuming this week. Thank you for your patience!


	64. Chapter 64

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended.)

ooo

She woke in the dark, with that sudden panic of not knowing what day it was, and then remembered: yes, the day of the indictments. That stab of terror wasn't on her own behalf-well, not entirely.

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**3 January 1999**

Now under heavy encryption, the spell relents to let me write. Interesting. And if I were to time-limit the encryption-?

We won't ask, because I need to write.

I have seen the indictments in draft, and there's a part of me that thinks: no, that's insane, they will be revised. I am not sure if I believe that, and I'm certainly quite sure that their notions of political realism don't accord with mine. The pureblood faction, that little knot of Umbridge proteges, doesn't know anything about the world outside their enclave, nor properly appreciate what's bearing down on them-as long as the rogue Dementors are feeding elsewhere, and the werewolf packs kept at bay by the Aurors and the local vigilantes-or else are being made useful…

That's too close to coincidence or melodrama. How did they happen to find themselves in my immediate neighborhood on the night of the full moon?

And in whose custody are they now?

Wolfsbane and close observation… well, Boudicca Derwent and Hippocrates Smethwyck would have seen to that, if they're trustworthy, and Lavender indicated nothing to the contrary.

I must talk to Lavender and the rest of them, at nearest opportunity. Andromeda-well, Andromeda is otherwise occupied for the moment. If I didn't mishear that, she's to duel Molly over the question of the Amortentia.

My head spins.

Even with a time-turner.

And I had that conversation with Neville, about dosing me with Dreamless Sleep.

"Gran did it," he said, "but I don't disagree. You're taking on too much."

I frowned, and he said, "No, look at it. How many times have you looped back? I thought about New Year's Eve and it must have been forty hours-or more. And you're not only doing that because you fancy a reputation for being thorough."

"It's not about _reputation_. It's about getting the work done -"

"And there's too much work. Look at Percy Weasley. He's going grey, and you -"

He brushed a hand through my hair, and plucked a hair. "Silver." I shivered for a moment, thinking about the Polyjuice, even as he Vanished the hair.

"My work's done at the Ministry," I said, "and the other job is gone, too, I think. I can't really go back given what's on those cameras."

He looked at me. "Do you think you're the only one who can do it?"

"Do what?"

"All the things under consideration." The Banishing, he meant, from the significant look-and the fact he could not produce the next sentence.

"It's complicated."

"That's the point. It's complicated. It's far more than one person's job. Gran had words with Percy about it, I think."

What led him to that conclusion, I wasn't going to ask. Neville was surprisingly well-informed.

Well, hadn't I underestimated him all along? Granted I was in fairly distinguished company there, but still …

He said, "If you Body-bind me and step over me this time, there are others behind me."

"I wasn't thinking of that!"

"I was."

He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. "I'd stand in your way again if you were on your way to destroying yourself. Remember, you had approval for that time-turner."

"McGonagall."

"Do you think the Ministry doesn't know? Anybody looking at the timetables for those meetings would know. Percy knows. And he's not the only one paying attention to your comings and goings."

"There's the werewolves."

"Yes. Rather more coincidence than I like."

I shivered. He hadn't objected, hadn't called me paranoid. I almost wished he would.

Not that it would change my mind-

"It's time to get dressed," he said.

ooo

How to talk about any of it? Well, to begin with the atmosphere at breakfast. Thick silence, sharp clatter of silverware, dull thump of the heart as I remembered from time to time what day this was. Draco's pale face, across from me, had the carven insolence that I've come to recognize as his own peculiar bravado. He said nothing, met my glance with his pale eyes and quirked mouth, as if daring me to raise the subject.

Which would have been superfluous on my part, given we all knew what was going to happen at ten o'clock.

The food was excellent as usual, but I didn't taste it except when I reminded myself -which I've done every day, really, since I returned from that visit to Azkaban. And yes, let me say it: Azkaban, because that's the long cold shadow in which we dined. I know what's in the archives.

Oh gods, I know what's in the indictments, now. But that's running ahead of the story.

Andromeda's expression was severe, too. I wondered how many times her family tree and Gran's had crossed; in the dim light they looked alike, two dark-haired women with dark eyes and grimly set mouths, waiting for the next blow. They say the worst of combat is the waiting (and I'd know that from experience, wouldn't I). I am not the condemned, but I have seen…

To it, then, because there's no way to write about the time in between. Breakfast-interminable, and then the wait. No point in going elsewhere, so we sat down on that vile horsehair couch, one of us on either side of Draco, Andromeda alongside, Gran in waiting.

Neville told me that Andromeda came to sit with Gran in the waiting-room at St. Mungo's, when his parents were brought there…

Favors are returned in these circles on the long plan of the decades. That's what family means, isn't it?

And they stand by each other in the matter of duels, as well.

This one's harder. Waiting is a lot harder.

When the messenger arrived, it was almost a relief.

The first that struck me was the cheekbones and chin, the deep-set eyes-and the elegant swagger that made the Ministry robes seem foppish and extravagant, though I looked and there was nothing non-regulation about them. No doubt the surname of Black turned up more than once in his family tree; he carried the evidence in his bones. He had grey eyes, in shade somewhere between Andromeda's storm-grey and Draco's ice.

I stared at him as he recited the archaic formula, asked Draco if he acknowledged the charges, and then turned in a whirl of robes, swept out the door, and Apparated in a thunderclap.

Andromeda shuddered faintly with a sneer on her face that reminded me of Narcissa. _Bad form_, that look said.

Augusta brought out the Firewhiskey and poured us all a finger. The good stuff, I might add-it was a degree yet more searing than the stores she'd served before, which felt like cauterizing the brain after what we'd heard.

Or warming the ice that had settled in my belly.

_Voldemort's number three._

"Those fuckers," I said, and nobody even flinched. No, it was worse than the draft - that had had the same substance, but the construction they'd put on it -

Absurd.

Draco downed his glass in a single gulp, and swayed next to me. "Ars long, vita breva," he said. "I could be drunk the whole time."

Between now and his trial, and then his sentencing to Azkaban.

Augusta turned the full fire of her glare on him.

"Or I could revise Potions." He smirked at me. "I shall trounce you, Granger."

I responded in kind, and he then said, "Taking up for me as if I were a rogue Hippogriff, then?"

For a moment, I wanted to reprise that slap, and then I realized that was exactly what he meant. He'd rather have my animosity than my pity. I said, "I will _annihilate_ you."

The smirk then gave way to a real smile, and he looked at my tumbler, three-quarters full. "Are you going to drink all of that?"

It was Andromeda's turn to give him a quelling look, which only half succeeded.

ooo

No, Draco Malfoy has never been capable of leaving it alone, even when it's his own skin, and _did _ he have to remind her of that whole business with the hippogriff, but yes it is ridiculous, yes, it's unimaginably awful and it makes no sense, and yes, that slightly maniacal laughter is her own. The scene plays itself over and over. And he might well mean the same thing here, that he's a hopeless cause.

"Malfoy, you have a twisted sense of humor." Which may be the sense of humor that the times require; certainly she's having trouble containing her own laughter and her detached sense that this probably isn't happening.

The crystal decanter is set down in front of them; Hermione counts five tumblers. Augusta pours a finger of firewhiskey into each.

"It's early in the day yet, but I think the occasion merits it."

Hermione closes her eyes and takes the drink slowly, savors the clean burn, oh yes and a good thing she took it slowly, because the fire builds and races through her veins, prickles her skin, flames on her face.

This must be the good stuff.

When she opens her eyes, Draco is grinning at her, his tumbler held loosely in his hand, with the thinnest remnant rocking in the bottom. He's swaying slightly, his face flushed. The grin—no, it's not exactly a smile nor a rictus either—shows his teeth back to the first molars.

"You're _drunk,_" Andromeda says, in an imperially quelling tone. Draco moderates the grin to a smirk, as if he's done something dreadfully clever but feels constrained to exercise modesty.

"No," he clarifies, stifling giggles, "I am not _drunk._ I am _doomed._ I am going to die in fucking Azkaban and there's nothing anyone on earth can do about it."

Neville says, "Sit down, Draco," and Draco obeys, long legs folding themselves back to a seated position like a fan snapped shut.

"I _hate_ firewhiskey, you know," he says.

Hermione finishes her drink, as she considers Draco's reaction. At least he's holding up, more or less. The heat of the drink does nothing to reduce the cold in her own stomach.

"Well, that's that until the trials, I suppose." Inane enough, she supposes.

Draco promptly replies, "There are the NEWTs." He's eyeing her drink, and she shakes her head. He lifts his chin in defiance, and she sees that Augusta is giving him her frostiest look. "_Ars longa, vita breva._ I _could _be drunk the whole time. It's only two months, after all." He smirks, and says, "Or I could revise Potions."

Well, that would be an improvement on perpetual drunkenness, and given the house elf, mutually exclusive.

He lifts his empty tumbler. "I _shall_ trounce you, Granger."

She clinks her glass against his, feeling the jar as they clack. He's quite drunk. She didn't know it was physically possible to get that drunk that fast. "We'll see about that, Malfoy."

The NEWTs are on her agenda, of course, but that's not for some time. And she has a time turner, and world enough and time - if only they would understand how necessary it is that she use it.

ooo

Andromeda and Augusta withdrew to Augusta's study for some no doubt confidential conversation.

Hermione turned to Draco. "You're not going to spend the whole time drunk."

He glared back at her, and at Neville. "I'll do as I please."

Neville said, "There are better ways to pass the time." and then he smiled, a smile that Hermione had seen on his face only once or twice. "And this time we'll be awake for it."

Hermione put the flask in his hand. "Sobriety Potion. Because we're taking a walk this afternoon." He stared at it, until he saw the look. Yes, she was very pleased with herself: she was projecting _She Who Must Be Obeyed_ in a way that even Augusta Longbottom would approve.

It helped immensely to have good role models.

Neville said, "Drink up, because you don't want to be drunk where we're going."

Draco glowered at them, and then knocked it back in one shot, tilting his head back and swallowing it without tasting. Very like his Polyjuice technique. She wondered what other Potions he'd dosed himself with… well, no, he would have been taking them by way of medicine since he was a small child. Of course.

Neville excused himself, and returned a few minutes later with an armful of heavy tweeds. "My grandfather's things," he said. Draco reared back and stared. "He was a keen rambler, and we'll just transfigure them to fit you." He smiled. "Fresh air is the sovereign specific."

To Hermione's surprise, Draco acceded with good grace, letting Neville drape the jacket across his shoulders as he took out his wand to tweak it. The wool was dark, flecked with deep red and green both. Draco's pale, sharp face looked well in that dark color-not the flat black of his Yule Ball dress robes, that had made him look washed out… Absently, she brushed his pale hair out of the way, off the collar and the shoulders, so that Neville could have a clear view for the work of Transfiguration; and he smiled and inclined his face to her hand, turning the gesture into a caress.

She shivered as his lips grazed her palm, and then jumped as his teeth closed on her wrist. "Don't do that." Just like a cat, though not Crookshanks, who was very much better behaved.

He smiled, the one that made her think of something pointy-faced with a mouth full of needle-sharp little teeth.

"Draco, behave," Neville said absently, circling to the other side to check the tailoring. "You can provoke us later." The answering shiver was visible.

So it was going to be like _that_.

She resisted the urge to pinch him. Because after all, there was the walk first.

ooo

"Mind the weather and your watch," Augusta said, and reminded them as well that the house-elf would be annoyed if they made it late for the preparation of luncheon

The elf hovered just at the margin of vision, as Neville opened the doors to the terrace, and Hermione remembered what they'd done in that doorway… Neville remembered, too, because he brushed against her and squeezed her hand in his warm grip.

She took Draco's arm, only half by way of bodyguard, and Neville smiled. "Good weather, a bit of snow. Let's walk to the Rose and Crown."

Draco looked at him quizzically.

"You've never been to a Muggle pub, have you?" Draco shook his head, with a disdainful flip of the hair. It was getting long enough to gesture with.

They set off on the walk, with the silence of the snow and the brightening sky and the wind chilling their faces. By common agreement they went without the warming charm; to Hermione's surprise, Draco did not complain about that, but seemed to savor the exercise. He kept up with them with a good will.

ooo

They tramped through the snow in relative silence; Hermione had relinquished Draco's arm, because the elf was doing a fine job of minding the perimeter. Anyway, from the look that lanced her way from time to time, grey-eyed and sultry, she didn't think he was contemplating escape.

Neville said, "It's nonsense of course."

_The indictments,_ he meant. She said, "Pernicious nonsense. But that doesn't mean they won't act on it."

"I'd rather not talk about it," Draco said.

"And what would you like to talk about?"

"How I'm going to trounce you at Potions." He smiled, carnivorously. "I've been revising, and you…" He smirked. "Gallivanting around the Ministry and all points of the compass."

Hermione shrugged. "Have it your way, Malfoy."

"And so I will." He seemed disappointed that she didn't press him further.

Oh, well. If it made him feel better… "No, Malfoy, you've got it absolutely wrong. I am going to annihilate you." Ah yes, that was it. The smile returned, and the light in the eyes.

"We'll see. Some of us paid attention in Snape's class."

"When they weren't being provoking prats," Hermione said, with the definite sense of humoring him. Which had not been the sort of girl she was, but circumstances altered cases.

Neville nudged her. "Or was that the class on having an argument?"

"No, it was contradictions," Hermione said, smiling.

Draco frowned. "Oh, do go on." He didn't appear to recognize the Muggle allusion, only that it was being made. "Snape knew a dunderhead when he saw one."

She had the childish urge to push him down in the snow, and rub it in his face. Gods, was he annoying. Neville appeared unruffled by mention of his nemesis, which was the main thing.

Because if Draco pushed _that_ too hard, there was no question what side she was going to choose.

Draco seemed content for the moment, having two sets of eyes on him, at least one of them glaring. "I don't suppose one can get butterbeer at a Muggle pub."

"No, but there are other things."

ooo

The other things proved not to his taste; Hermione could have predicted that. They settled back into the booth, with their drinks. Nothing on the list of offerings was sweet enough, so they ordered tea for him, and watched him spoon unconscionable amounts of sugar into it.

The elf hovered in the shadows, half shadow itself. Neville glanced its way; Augusta said that the locals were used to odd things.

"Hullo, lad!" There was a big, tall man—well, two of them, blocking the light. Draco's hands tightened around his teacup.

"Back from your dad's school, eh?"

Neville stood up to clap one of them on the shoulder. "Robbie." He glanced at Hermione, "My friends from primary school. Robbie, Andrew, this is Hermione."

Hermione smiled and extended her hand for the handshake. She didn't miss the look exchanged between the boys. Neville may have let slip that there was a girl he fancied.

Draco sat up even straighter in the booth next to her.

"And Draco. Schoolmate of ours."

Interestingly, Draco shook hands with them. Very interesting. Friends of Neville's were diplomatically significant, and he was behaving himself as he had not with Nigel Black.

Nigel. Well, that was another complication. Quite.

"So, off on a ramble?"

"Only for a bit. Gran's expecting us." He budged over and indicated the empty seats. "There's time for a pint, though."

Hermione watched the faces: Andrew was the taller of the two, and Robbie the broader. Big, athletic lads, not the sort she would have assumed for Neville's Muggle friends. She settled back, and listened to them talk about other people she hadn't met. Miranda, Andrew's girlfriend, and someone named Martin, who (she gathered) had something of a reputation as an eccentric.

Draco took a sip of his tea, his face settling into the frosty disdain of the Prince in Exile. _Muggles, _he was thinking, as clearly as if it were written in the air above his head. Hermione sipped her ale, thinking about the next things on the agenda, and the Potions revision. Draco was going to have a distraction, then, and she was going to give him a good run for his money.

She wondered what his actual relations with Snape had been, behind closed doors, if he'd been entrusted with the improvements to the Wolfsbane Potion. Lucius had done him no favors, really, with buying him a place on the Quidditch team… because he did have ability, and the same was true for Potions. He wasn't _only_ a Pureblood heir who'd had the path paved for him…

Of course, the privileged tone set her teeth on edge, and she didn't forget that she'd had no such help. He'd just have to see if he could get full marks on everything, because she had every intention of doing so herself.

"Good as new," Robbie was saying, with a wave to encompass the interior of the pub. "Your Gran and her lot helped out, so I'm told."

Neville was nodding absently.

"Never seen a fire like that," Andrew said. The barman brought their drinks. "Lucky to get out alive, we were."

"Hope this summer's a bit less eventful," Robbie added.

This summer. The trials would be over by summer, and … possibly the other matter as well.

The other matter. The Banishing of the Dementors. Yes, she could think that. There were no Legilimens at this table.

"Your mate's welcome on the ramble, too, if he likes that sort of thing," Robbie said. Hermione startled, mostly at the awkward silence.

"If I'm not… abroad then, well yes," Draco said. "June's rather far off."

Abroad. Well, that was clever by way of a euphemism for _immured in Azkaban._

Neville said, "We'll see." Then he glanced at his watch. "Gran's expecting us."

"She who must be obeyed," Robbie ventured, and it didn't have the tone of a joke at all.

Draco was silent, on the walk home. It had a companionable feeling, that he didn't need to be filling the silence with hostile sallies. Still, she was startled to turn and see a half-smile on his face, and rather rosier color than she expected. The long rhythm of a good ramble was cheering. She liked Neville's friends, unexpected as they were.

ooo

On the way home, Neville was quiet, looking out to the horizon or up to the sky, as if awaiting ill weather. Hermione tramped alongside.

Finally he said, "I've missed them." She waited. "I used to miss them even more, when I was at Hogwarts."

"They seemed … "

"Ordinary. Nice ordinary Muggle lads. They didn't even mind that I was rubbish at football."

"What's football?" Draco asked.

"Sort of Quidditch, less the hoops … well, and only one ball, and of course no brooms."

Draco frowned at Neville. "And you were rubbish at _that? "_

Neville turned and glared at him. "And you were a good part of why I wanted to be back here."

He turned abruptly away, and Draco stared at him.

No, I will not smooth this over, Hermione thought. He's gone and put his foot in it. Let him figure his way out of it.

Draco stopped and stared, his eyes widening.

"I'd rather not talk about it," Neville said, half to her.

Draco looked at her in appeal, and she shook her head.

"Gran's waiting for us," Hermione said.

Draco stared at her, and she looked at him and then at Neville.

"You always go too far," she said. "Cannot leave well enough."

She pushed him, and he fell backward into the snow, and then she was on top of him, pushing the snow into his face, down his shirt, and then (in spite of Draco's twisting and squeaking) inside the waist of his trousers, until Neville tugged at her sleeve, and she stood, and dusted her hands off, and Draco looked up at her, red in the face, and said, "So."

And then turned to Neville and said, "Care to have a go?"

Draco shrieked when Neivlle held him down with one hand and with the other shoved more of the white stuff up his shirt, and finally gasped, "Quite enough!"

"I won't be saying anything else," he said, though his eyes were bright. "Quite enough."

His teeth were chattering, and Hermione swept a quick contemptuous glance over him before flicking the wand to dry and warm him.

No, it was perverse of her, but she'd wished that Neville would have had at him as she had …

… Exactly that's what he wanted, wasn't it?

"You might simply _ask_," she said. "No need to go setting off raw nerves and reminding us of why we didn't like you very much."

"No fun if there's no sense of danger," he said.

"You wouldn't have said that…" and then she cut off herself, on the verge of saying something unspeakable. "Now let's get home. It's cold and Gran will be waiting up."

"You really don't have much sense for setting a mood, do you, Granger?"

Nonetheless he grew more cheerful as they tramped toward home.

ooo

Just outside the door, as Neville passed inside, she turned to Draco with a sharp nod in Neville's direction, and said, "Don't do that again. Not if you value your life."

"Oh, so you're thinking he'll snap on me."

"Oh no," she said, "I will."

And with that she turned and walked into the warmth of the front room.

ooo

**From the journal of Hermione Granger**

**3 January 1999 **

I am still not used to writing that date, and of course I keep thinking about all the associations with apocalypse, given we are closing in on the end of the millennium. There's the whole Y2K problem, of course, which may put a thoroughly Muggle coda on the coming year, if the reactors in Siberia melt down when the accounting fails to come round… no, I won't think about that because it's beyond my reach. I cannot work on all problems. And the indictments already give me enough cause for worry.

They're taken all the information I so painstakingly catalogued—and others collected, and yet others stepped forward to give—and they've made a thorough mess of it. Voldemort's number three. I've seen those Pensieve depositions, and there's no such thing. He was a scared teenage boy who had taken on more than he should, not that he had much of a choice. And his family—well, Lucius still gives me the shudders, and Narcissa likewise. But their son is—well, if not innocent, then far from as culpable as those accusations make out…

And even if he's acquitted of all charges, people will still remember the charges. That's the whole point of making the accusation in the first place. He's not going to survive this even if he comes through the trial in one piece—which given the way this is shaping up, is looking less and less likely.

And I can't help wondering what the next travesty will be. They've got a rich fund of data there, and they could be twisting it about and trumping up charges for the next century. Certainly Percy told me that the hardline purebloods have expressed interest in it.

I think I can't wait for Percy's Luddite irregulars to scotch the bureaucratic end of the matter. We have to take out the data, completely and totally. If only I'd thought to rig a bomb while I was yet working there… but I was thinking like an archivist, not a saboteur, and I wasn't thinking that the Ministry was the enemy. I was hoping to reform it.

_Reform the Ministry (not sure about the timeline for this one; may not be finished by September)_. Yes. Number two on my list of things to do this summer.

I laugh, because crying would go on too long. Yes, I was half tongue in cheek writing that, but I had some essential optimism—

—After all, the Ministry meant Kingsley Shacklebolt and Arthur Weasley, and the others in the resistance who'd replaced the bad apples—

No. Arthur persists _in spite of_ the Ministry, and Kingsley—well, Kingsley is trapped, as far as I can tell. Not good.

And then there's the matter of my parents—

No, I must talk to Percy soon. Very soon. I don't like the idea of that treasure house of data awaiting anyone who might lay hands on it—

No. Those indictments mean that we can't look to reform. It's going to have to be revolution.

Oh, don't be thick. It's going to have to be revolution anyway, because if the Ministry doesn't dissolve itself willingly, it will be sucked into the Void along with the Dementors when we do the Banishing. That much has come clear over the last weeks—days—

I can't remember, which is the world's time and which is mine. Too much has happened, and too much remains to be done.

Draco put his foot in it, I should add. He should have just shut it when Neville started talking about his days at Hogwarts and how he'd wished he could be home with Andrew and Robbie, ordinary lads who treated him with common kindness.

Unlike Draco, whom I'd like to throttle, mostly on Neville's account. I don't want to see that bleak look on Neville's face again. Draco should have just kept silent and made himself very small, because…

… Just because. I'm consumed with rage as I write this, and that's personal. I won't try to put that in the same frame as those outrageous indictments—

—Just because he's a present victim of injustice doesn't mean he was a hero before. It's just out-of-scale, and anyway the bureaucrats who wrote those indictments weren't thinking of Draco's juvenile cruelties at school. They probably did the same or worse in their own day. It's politics, pure and simple. "Look, there's the guilty one, the evil one who started all that." Narcissa's an adult, but from all I could see, she was far from a member of the inner circle. She was Lucius's helpmate and the sister of Bellatrix, and there's no question but that she shared their convictions. But—

But she was not a Death Eater, and even the evidence collected with the intention of prosecution could not establish that.

So they wrote another set of charges.

The whole thing—

—Oh yes, and it's 'Unforgivable Curses used on Pureblood and Half-blood witches and wizards." Interesting. They leave the Muggle- born out of it, because … who do you think was the head of the Muggle-born Registration Commission? Yes. It does begin to come clear.

No, I have to get in there and destroy the databank. It won't stop them doing whatever they're going to do, which by now they could have settled on. It will take care of the future threat…

No, I don't want to think about this.

I'll set an appointment with Percy just as soon as I can. I'd be surprised if he hasn't thought about this—he has, per our conversation at Christmas. Neither of us was thinking of that, well, not so far up the list.

Whom else do they intend to indict? Not only for the trials, but down the line, a week, a month, a year or ten years after the War Crimes tribunal has put the whole lot of them behind bars.

No. I won't think of that.

And it's afternoon, a grey-bellied cloudy sky outside and the snow sifting again once more.

More to do. More. Yet more.

And I have to talk to Lavender about the werewolf situation…

Too much.

A knock on the door, so I must go.

ooo

Obsessing. .she was obsessing, and knew it. She and Neville sat in the front room. Neville was staring out the window, with a stony look on his face.

How did we back into this? Well, the question was hovering in the air now pretty much every moment, and she could honestly answer it: they'd backed into it, and none of the steps felt like too much—

—Except for playing about with the Polyjuice. Except for her hubris and her isolation. Except for any of the snowflakes that made up this particular avalanche. Nothing by itself was that large, but one after another sifted down…

… She remembered as a child thinking about the accumulation of the very small, watching a snowfall and trying to count the snowflakes, or capture how it went from a faint dust whirling in the air to banks of solid white ….

It creeps upon you, she had decided then.

.

ooo

She excused herself and went to the study to write her letters, shadowed by the elf.

_Dear Percy,_

_I helped you with your part of it. Now I am calling in my side of the bargain. I will be free tomorrow afternoon. Let me know if you can meet me for luncheon, Muggle location preferred. Our usual cafe would be fine._

_Yours,_

_H._

ooo

_Dear Lavender,_

_I'm writing to follow up with you about the fate of our werewolves. Have you been able to learn anything? I will be free tomorrow afternoon to meet you._

_Yours,_

_Hermione_

She climbed the narrow staircase to the Owlery, and gave both messages to a single bird. "Grimmauld Place," she whispered. "They're both there…"

And then she came down to dinner.

At supper, Andromeda Tonks was chatting with Draco about their visit to his cousin in London on the morrow.

"His cousin?"

"My late husband's people," Andromeda said. "Edward Tonks, his wife Jeanette, and his daughter Audrey. Nymphadora's first cousin." Draco shrugged.

"We'll outfit him," Neville said.

Draco shot him that icy-sultry glance. Oh, it was going to be like that, then. If only Draco's notion of seduction didn't include being as annoying as possible, and crossing the line into _things she didn't want to think about_.

Andromeda's answering look, if she didn't mistake, was pitying.

ooo


	65. Chapter 65

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended)

ooo

It was long since dark when the owl returned, with two messages attached.

A canny bird, she thought, because it demanded a double ration of owl treats before it would permit her to detach the messages and read them.

From Percy: very brief and to the point, that he'd be available at the lunch hour. He had to go to the Ministry on business, because as she knew, in spite of his sister's illness, he had to keep an eye on things. Ginny was going to be out and about with friends, which relieved his mind somewhat.

From Lavender: yes, they could meet that morning. She was otherwise committed in the afternoon. If she didn't hear back, she'd assume that ten o'clock would do.

So. That was settled.

Neville put in his head and asked if she were quite all right. Translation: was she gadding about with the time turner.

"Oh, I'm fine," she said.

"Draco says he's too tired to consider fashion this evening." She waited for the rest of it. "He means to take things off rather than put them on, he said."

"So it's like that."

Neville smiled. "Yes, it's like that."

She put the messages in her blue bag. "I'll be along in a minute."

ooo

The next morning came much too early.

Well, they all did these days, between one thing and another. Time had a curious quality, when not folded back on itself with the time-turner. Yes, it was still on its golden chain around her neck.

She yawned, as Neville handed her the blue beaded bag. She was still in transit, one place to the other. Always traveling. This quiet sojourn at Longbottom House was going to come to an end shortly, though, so she should savor it while it lasted. Once she talked to Percy…

Well, once she talked to Percy, the gears would be set in motion for better or worse. She regretted the necessity of destroying what she had built with her own hands, but she could already see the purposes to which it would be put. And the preciousness of abstract knowledge faded to nothing when she contemplated the prospect of Harry or herself in the dock for whatever crimes they might dream up for them. If Draco Malfoy could be indicted as Voldemort's number three, anything was possible.

And for Lavender…

Neville nudged her. "Your bag. You've been staring into space for the last five minutes."

"Oh, sorry. Thinking."

He kissed her on the forehead. She smiled at him, and took the day's clothes out of the bag.

ooo

The house elf had an early breakfast ready for them, an abbreviated version of the usual repast, over which they compared timetables: she'd be at Grimmauld Place, she told him, and he'd be stopping in at Hogwarts, once they sorted Draco's sartorial questions.

"McGonagall told me I had to spend the holidays here," he said, "but I'm thinking about the greenhouses…" The children in the greenhouses, he meant, of course.

"And there's the werewolf problem…"

"You mean the Nigel Black problem."

"That too." She said, "Draco has more than one long-lost cousin."

Neville looked at her and then shook his head. "Oh no."

"Nigel Black. Yes. Grandson of the Squib Marius." She added, "Andromeda has two of them on her hands, it does appear. I don't envy her." She finished the last of the eggs and chased them with a cup of coffee. "And the werewolf situation is complicated. I wasn't the only one who had an exciting New Year's Eve."

Neville turned bright red, and she reached across the small table to stroke his hair. "Some excitement we like," he murmured.

"Something to anticipate," she said.

As opposed to that which she dreaded. Draco was very much more malleable in bed than out of it.

ooo

Andromeda's entrance was something of a relief, because Draco had been alternating between preening and fits of temper. The ensemble that had been acceptable for rambling and meeting Neville's friends yesterday, today was unacceptable for a casual family visit with his London Muggle cousin.

"You're repeating yourself," Hermione said.

Draco stared at her with his iciest, most supercilious look, mid-pirouette in front of the mirror. "It _won't do._ I look _ancient._ And it's Longbottom's grandfather's togs."

"I've already told you. Retro will do nicely. One would think you were interested in making an impression." She felt herself smirk. She'd always suspected that Draco had an altogether too intimate understanding with his mirror. "Should I be jealous?"

Neville said, "Don't encourage him."

"We got up early for this. Draco, _calm down._" She flicked her wand once more to rearrange the pleats of the dark-grey trousers. "Now that's the _last time_."

Andromeda seconded that with a magisterial nod.

Draco craned to see his reflection in the mirror over the fireplace. "Oh, I suppose it will do," he said.

Once he had departed, Neville said, "A turn-up for the books, as Gran would say. Malfoy's all fussed about impressing his Muggle cousin."

"His Muggle girl cousin." She giggled. "Times have changed." More grimly, the prospect of life in Azkaban did wonderfully focus the mind.

ooo

They were both dressed as if going out for another ramble. United in deception this time, because Neville was going to Hogwarts and she to London, to Grimmauld Place.

They walked out together and didn't Apparate until they were a safe distance from the house.

ooo

Lavender greeted her as she stepped through the kitchen Floo at Grimmauld Place. "Good to see you," she said.

Ron was sitting in the room, and with him, Justin. "I thought I'd simplify things," Lavender said, "since we ought to talk about this. Andromeda's busy, but we'll be taking her on a tour of the new facility when we meet on Saturday."

Justin nodded to her. "My mother's got things well in hand. We have a residence, and the curse-breakers just gave it a clean bill of health last week. Rather fortunate timing, all things considered."

"A residence?"

"For the werewolves. And we've secured a social worker, and will be looking into educational staff." He said, "We're well past full moon, so we thought it timely to move them from St. Mungo's to the new location. They're settling in well, by all accounts."

"So that includes Nigel Black, as well."

"Well, as a difficult case, and a Muggle, we gave him his own room. Not that there's any shortage of rooms." He smiled. "It's the Lestrange mansion, and it has an infinitely expandable guest annex. Very convenient for this purpose. The Goblins gave the Foundation very favorable terms on the house, and loaned us a team of curse-breakers."

"I don't know if I'll be able to come to the meeting on Saturday," Hermione said, reaching for the timetable in her blue bag.

"No worries. We can follow up with notes." Lavender smiled. "I'm putting things in order so there won't be any slippages when I'm in hospital at St. Mungo's." Yes. Hermione had forgotten that, well, she'd have to make sure it was on her agenda for that date. Right after the NEWTs, if she didn't misremember.

Ron flinched a bit at the mention, and then said, "At least Nigel Black doesn't have to stay here. I wasn't fancying the notion of seeing him over breakfast."

"No, that would have been appalling." That out of her mouth before she could stop herself, and Ron didn't fail to notice.

"What did he do?" He narrowed his eyes.

Hermione sighed, and told the story, in bare essentials, beginning with Nigel's first signs of interest, down to the threat of losing her job if she didn't come to the party, and the whole background to the werewolf attack.

"I'd have left him to the wolves," Ron said.

"No, you wouldn't. You were the one pulling the Aurors up short and telling them to be very afraid if they didn't follow the new protocol."

"Oh, so Dean wasn't far off in his guess," Lavender said, "and for the record, if he ever tries that again, I'll personally go over there and Vanish his bits." Calm, quiet, utterly without a flinch, and interestingly, Ron just nodded.

"And I'll be there cheering her on," he said. "Sounds just like Malfoy too, except he threatened you with someone else's father."

"Except Malfoy never tried to rape anybody. Even when the Death Eaters were running Hogwarts." Lavender shuddered. "Unlike his goons."

"He threatened you with _my father_, to be precise," Justin said, and it wasn't only the scars that pulled his mouth into a sour grimace. "I knew he was going to be a problem…"

"Just not on this scale," Lavender said, "but bear in mind, there's a whole pack of them we'll be dealing with. Actually two packs, because there's the London contingent and the lot the Aurors brought in from Manchester." She said, "Thankfully our house-parents are a fully qualified witch and wizard."

"So the werewolves are all witches and wizards, too…" She was thinking this out as she went along, and the implications were messy. "Are they trained at all? Are we going to have magical duels in the corridors between the two packs?"

"Oh no, just the ordinary kind," Lavender said, "and we're working on the question of training. Not only conflict resolution, but magical skills."

"Mother thinks it's essential we get them properly trained, if they're to be assimilated back into wizarding society. We're in negotiations with the Hogwarts Headmistress to set up an educational annex at the house, so that their medical supervision need not interrupt their studies."

Hermione nodded. They had wasted no time, though she hadn't expected that those plans would be put into action quite this soon.

"And the Quibbler Press is taking on the Umbridge nonsense," Justin said, "so her notions of werewolf policy won't go unanswered."

She wondered just how soon the civil war would progress from bureaucratic sniping and espionage to open conflict. She shivered. Better to assume sooner rather than later, and not to put too much stock in the War Crimes Trials, given what she'd just seen in the indictments.

A good thing, her meeting with Percy, all in all.

ooo

Percy showed up a little before noon, still wearing his Ministry robes. "Give me a bit to get presentable, and we'll be off presently." He flashed a quick and weary smile at Ron, which Ron returned. She wondered how much Ron knew about Percy's doings at the Ministry, or if that rapprochement were only on account of Ginny's rescue.

Lavender said, "We're thinking of approaching Harry to teach Defense."

She blinked.

"At the Hogwarts Annex," she said, "because we don't have the sense he's actually all that happy as a trainee Auror."

Justin added, "And it would send a message. Pretty unmistakable, I would think."

And it would get at least one of her friends clear of the disaster that would overtake the Ministry if they didn't consent to dissolve, she thought, but that wasn't something she was going to bring up here.

Ron smiled at her. "You're just as busy as you ever were."

"You're pretty busy yourself."

"I know. I think I had some notion that the post-war was going to be a holiday… or at least a rest." He squared his shoulders. "I expected something a bit more simple. And that wasn't just, all around." He said, "I never thought I'd say this, but Malfoy did the right thing."

"He's been thinking."

"Last wishes." He looked at Lavender, and then back to her. "Putting his affairs in order. He's different. I'm almost wishing that he survives it, because he might not be a bad sort after all this." He took a deep breath, and let it out in a sigh. "And I was wrong. At midsummer, Harry's birthday. I was a right git, and I hurt you. Bill gave me a talking-to about it, right after and then again after I started seeing Lavender."

"As well he should," Lavender said, and to her surprise, Ron didn't bridle but nodded. "He talked to me too. Said he'd come right up to asking you if your intentions were honorable, because he didn't want to be out a St. Mungo's liaison officer if you were just playing about."

"And that Quidditch game…" he sighed. "I should have known that something was wrong with Ginny, and I shouldn't have been such an ass generally."

She swallowed, her throat suddenly tight and thick. She hadn't been prepared for an apology from Ron. Apparently it showed on her face, because he said, "And then when you did come to the Burrow, you just said your piece and left, and it's only Harry that's gotten a talking-to. And yes, I'm thick and it takes me a bit to figure out when I've messed things up, but I did want my chance to say I'm sorry." He looked at her, very serious now. "Just like Malfoy. Last things. There's something in the offing, isn't there? You're running around wizarding London conspiring with everybody there is to conspire with, and your future grandmother-in-law is the least of it. And whatever it is, it's dangerous, because you're saying nothing to anybody."

She felt her mouth drop open.

"I thought you and Percy were going to end up together, and then it turns out that's just another of your conspiracies. Then there's you and Neville. And Percy—" He broke off. Apparently the notion of _Percy and Augusta_ was just a bit much for him.

"It's the post-war marriage boom," Justin said, the faintest smile quirking the corner of his mouth.

Lavender smirked, and suppressed a giggle that was almost in her old style. Justin looked at her and raised an eyebrow. "You're full of news, aren't you?"

"You just looked so _disapproving._"

"Well, it's rather a crazy salad…" he glanced in the direction in which Percy had gone, "but then I gather that, absent Ginny, there was no other way that the Weasleys and the Longbottoms were going to form a marriage alliance."

Lavender looked at him with an appraising eye.

"Full points, then, on my Pureblood Marriage Customs exam?"

She nodded. "It's one theory, at least. And who might have been tutoring you?"

Justin turned a pleasant shade of pink. "Hannah Abbott." He added, "With a bit of well-timed help from Andromeda Tonks. So, yes, the negotiations are underway."

Lavender giggled. "I thought the two of you were going to dance around the handbags until you were Dumbledore's age at least. Are congratulations in order, then?"

"Provisionally." Justin recovered himself a bit. "Once Mother understood that it was the marriage alliance of the century we were talking about, she had no objections. Madam Tonks had to translate it from 'pub-keeper's apprentice' to 'heir apparent to control of the strategic access point.'" He said, "It's not translatable, really, keeper of the Leaky Cauldron, but she managed it."

"A meeting of minds," Lavender said. "If your mother had been a witch, she would have Sorted into Slytherin."

"And it made her happy, I think, because originally she'd meant me for a career in the diplomatic corps." Hermione mentally translated "originally" as "before the Hogwarts letter."

Ron said, "So anyway, I wanted to say I'm sorry. In case we don't survive this. Whatever it is."

"Accepted." And now for the important part. "So what tells you something's underway?"

"They sent werewolves after you." He said, "Not a big secret. They told us."

"Which they?"

"The werewolves. Said somebody dumped them in London right before the change—that was the last thing they remembered, that hotel plaza. Boudicca Derwent confirmed it with the Pensieve when they were being treated at St. Mungo's."

She felt a bit dizzy, just now. This was rather too much all at once.

Ron said, "Next year, if we survive this one, we're going to be at Shell Cottage. All of us. Bill and Fleur said they'd be hosting Christmas there." He said, "Harry told me about the two of you going to Dobby's grave. Next year, it's going to be all of us." He swallowed hard."If the war's over by then…"

_And if we're alive for it._

Percy saved the situation, walking in just then. He was dressed in Muggle clothes, a simple and conservative overcoat he was just buttoning closed over a dark suit.

"Ready for lunch, then?"

She nodded, though food was far from the major agenda item. In fact, she'd rather lost her appetite, contemplating the confirmation of her worst fears.

Of course, she would add that to the agenda. She had some thoughts about what might be done about the enemy in the Ministry.

ooo

They didn't talk until the front door of Twelve Grimmauld Place had closed behind them, and the winter weather and the crowds put a respectable distance between them and the rest.

"So, you have an extensive agenda, I trust," he said.

Percy generally got it in less than one, which was one of his more attractive features. "Quite."

"Well, best to face it over a good meal," he said. She did notice he had rather more spring in his step than before.

"You're looking well."

"Sleeping nights helps," he replied. "And Ginny's on the mend, I think, and that's an enormous relief. She's with Dean and his family today." He added, "As friends. Not … what I gather they were before. And Luna's with them." He frowned. "I'm given to understand that Dean's little sisters adore Luna, and insisted on her coming."

"So it's looking hopeful this early in the game."

"Yes. I think so, anyway. Once she's out from under the Amortentia, that's what Derwent said, things ought to be quite a bit better. The standard therapy is to reacquaint the patient with real loves, so that true feeling can return… and Ginny, luckily, has more than enough of those." His voice thickened, and he turned away, dabbing at his eyes as if something were caught in them. A bit of the blowing sleet, she'd politely pretend.

"And we'll see about treatment for the original problem, as well." He said, "The possession. What nobody really wanted to talk about. And yes, I can certainly understand Ginny's desire to cut up Lucius Malfoy into very small pieces, because I more than share it." He said, "Of course, it's not considered sporting now, but the man's an unforgivable _piece of work._ No doubt after the trial they're going to make him out a martyr to the Pureblood Lost Cause, but I, for one…"

The weather was doing nothing to keep the lunch-hour crowds down, and the restaurant was more than crowded. Luckily, Percy had made reservations, and the waiter showed them to their usual booth.

As soon as they were seated, Percy reached inside his jacket, and briefly flicked his wand.

A pleasant sort of silence enveloped them.

"So," he said, "we can speak freely now."

"I need to go to the Ministry," she said.

He frowned.

"And after that, if my suspicions are confirmed, we need to go to Australia. Forthwith."

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

"Oh, but you do. Well enough to know that there's a question about rogue werewolves, and yet another question about what they're planning to do with those so-called war crimes archives once the trials are over. Or perhaps I should say, after _this set of trials_ is over."

"I'm not sure when that's to be accomplished…"

"I have all the time in the world," she said, with a discreet tug on the golden chain that disappeared into the collar of her shirt, "or at least enough. All we have to do is find some time in the last day or so that would be advantageous…"

His eyes widened.

"Actually, I might need to go a bit further back,"

He stared at her. "You know that's dangerous."

"And what that we're doing isn't?"

"Well, there's dangerous and there's dangerous."

"When did you first have suspicions about your pureblood lot? Certainly before Christmas, because you told me about it that night."

"What do you need to do?"

"A bit of a trace, and … well, something I don't trust your irregulars to do. Something that I can do, given enough time."

Off-handedly, he ordered luncheon for both of them, _the usual,_ as they had been here so many times that the staff recognized them.

No doubt, from the indulgent look the waiter cast their way, they were assumed to be a married couple. Well, that was true after a fashion; they were certainly united in a cause.

They ate in silence, once the food had arrived; they took tea (for him) and coffee (for her), in the silent agreement that they would need to be alert for the next bit.

"Augusta is making sure of your health," he said.

"So she is, not letting me out of sight of her elf," Hermione replied, "which of course rules out using the time-turner. And that's well and good, and I appreciate the sentiment, but there is some work we must do before it's too late."

ooo

The nearest locked room was at her parents' house, and she hadn't used that in some days, not since New Year's at least, which (with foldings-over of the timeline) gave her at least seven unused threads … well, unused for the past almost week, which would be quite enough. That was a potential twenty-eight days. She wouldn't need anywhere near that.

Only slip back far enough, and read the log.

Because of course there was a log. It wasn't as if she'd been exactly trusting all along, and in any case it was good practice.

The only difficulty was getting in there to read it when no one else was about, and that was where Percy came in.

The extra time stored in the house (yes, that wasn't how it worked, but it was how she thought of it) could be used to review the log. And if she and Percy took on the task together, then it could be accomplished in half the time. All the while, in the world's time, she felt the clock ticking down to doomsday: whatever the Pureblood hard-liners had in mind for the trials, and then the attempted Banishing of the Dementors, and her parents' memory charm (and that would be a different business, requiring Derwent's involvement, and how that was going to happen…), and then of course the NEWTs. Never mind that society, if not her immediate bit of space-time, was on the verge of collapse, she must get her NEWTs. At least twelve, she thought; she might yet have a chance of besting Percy's own record.

Percy's perfect recollection of Ministry comings and goings helped them to select the time—not difficult, for it proved that New Year's Day, once the collective sigh of relief following the alert had sent everyone home, was just the time.

Shortly after noon.

In her own timeline—oh, where had she been?

At St. Mungo's with Nigel, or at Longbottom House, or asleep in her parents' house? She couldn't properly remember. Well, that would happen at the end of a long complicated life, which she was just living in parallel unlike the other mortals who lived theirs in series.

It wasn't too difficult, for she still had her keys; and the corridor was quiet; it reminded her of their previous Ministry raids, hers and Harry's and Ron's, well, yes, best not to think about that given what was at stake this time. She didn't need a case of nerves thinking about Umbridge's commission…

… Given that Umbridge's successors were very much present.

Once more she stood in the rooms at the Ministry, in front of the shimmering wall of patterns, and this time drew them in — there were spells that she had no intention of teaching anyone else, including Derwent — and folded them, and wrapped them round into a structure of almost unbearable brightness, which she deposited in the little black bottle she had brought for the purpose.

Percy looked on, his face faintly lit in the shifting colors of the war crimes archive. That's what those abstract lights were, the recitation of endless crimes, the locations of mass graves, the as yet unexploded ordnance of the postwar… well, or slowly detonating. The werewolves, the Death Eaters, the various caches of Dark artifacts that yet littered the landscape…

And then home, Apparating from the Ministry inside a time-loop, as before, to the foyer of her parents' house.

Like Sirius Black, she had never been in that locked room.

Or she had been there all along.

With a time-turner, it came to much the same thing. And in any case, there was work to be done.

She instructed Percy Weasley in the reading of the log, and the use of the locked rooms, and to his credit he didn't look any more than mildly set-back.

Four days ago, they started the review of the log.

ooo

At first it was routine; she walked through the log, reading the test queries she had run, and the counter-checks run by Derwent: nothing untoward there. She watched the database being built, recalled how she had labored over one detail or another, remembered how the geo-coding of the mass graves had been foiled by the Unplottable location of Malfoy Manor.

And then the Decommissioning had fixed that problem — back in mid-October, that had been, and now it was January, early January, with the trials to begin on the Ides of March. And before that, the NEWTs, and Lavender to be in hospital for the procedure that would transfer her high-risk pregnancy to a flask originally intended for the nurturing of homunculi, and somewhere in there would be another two full moons—at the end of January, and then in late February or early March, she'd have to consult a timetable to see when exactly it would fall.

The first sign of trouble was a gasp from Percy, and then a groan.

"Oh no." A scratch of quill, a muttered spell, and then a more recollected voice. "Have a look at this, will you? I'd like to confirm I'm reading it right."

A query, some time in November — well, she hadn't been reviewing logs then, hadn't thought to — early November, yes, a scant few days after that weekend assignation with Draco.

"The signature's not mine, or Derwent's."

"Oh, no question of that, and I don't like that name."

She frowned. "Hmm … I don't recognize it. Not anyone on the War Crimes Commission."

"They won't be doing the dirty work. This is one of the functionaries." He made a sour face. "But there's more or less a direct line to the Umbridge faction; I know whose apprentice that one was." He took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose, then sighed. "This is going to be quite a task; there's a tangle of these up ahead. Is there a way to ease this?"

"Oh yes," she said, "but it's still going to be a bit of work. But better to set it up now than have to backtrack."

In the gathering gloom of late-afternoon, the magical structure wove itself, and she gathered up each of the queries she'd gone through, her own and Derwent's, and created yet another table, Querent, with the magical signature and the time-stamp of anyone who'd had to do with the war crimes archive, and room for Percy's notes … "So we can query this, and review the patterns when we're done. Properly this should have been in the structure from the beginning, but they told me there was no need … "

Of course they'd tell her that.

And she hadn't been paying attention, had she? By then it was one more stop on the wild carousel of work, at the Ministry and then at the bank and with the Patronus training and the research, yes, the Dementor research was well underway by then (and she wondered how she'd trace who might have a guess about _that,_ and that might not be a question for Percy, very definitely it was not). They counted on her not paying attention, hadn't they? If McGonagall had signed off on that time-turner, surely others knew. Surely they knew, or suspected, and were counting on her to run herself into the ground…

… Or at least not to notice, or to fail to understand the import of the names that showed up in the query log.

Ah, but Percy Weasley knew.

"You aren't going to manage this alone," he said, as if to second the thought.

"I don't know how long this is going to take."

"You have all the time in the world. Or time enough — certainly a few working days would sort it, yes?"

"I'd hope so. I gather you have an idea what we're looking for."

"Well, you do and I do, more or less on separate counts, and together I think we'd be able to put together a fairly comprehensive picture. So, yes."

She nodded. "Did you have any idea you were setting off on an adventure?" He raised an eyebrow. Probably "adventure" was the wrong word; it sounded tinnily cheerful.

ooo

It was a bit of work to populate the Querent table, but well worth the effort; when she ran the test-query on it, for the list of Ministry employees (and possible others) who had run inquiries on the war crimes archives, Percy gasped.

"Oh no," he said.

"So. I gather it's a comprehensive roster of the enemy."

"Well, those acting on behalf of the enemy. I haven't a full notion of their strength, but I can guess. And this does not look good … now let's see what they're inquiring about."

"Well, that's not difficult."

ooo

Four hours later she had it, both the raw listing of queries and a set of abstracts—of whom, and what matters, and which tables, those queries had spoken, and how frequently, and the timeline…

Percy stared, his face gone white.

This time she didn't need his intermediate interpretation to feel the ice at her heart.

Her own name turned up, repeatedly, and Harry's, and Ron's, followed by the others, the Defense Association, Andromeda Tonks, Justin, Lavender, oh yes, that would be mostly the officers of the Remus Lupin Foundation, lots of inquiry about war-records …

… And Percy. They had been looking for instances of _his _name in all the wartime documents. She remembered just how adamant he had been about there being no discussion of what he'd done in the war… but there were people who were very definitely interested.

And then the queries on the current whereabouts of the giants, and the map of where the werewolves had been at the close of the war… and more recently, they'd been running queries about the cave on the coast where Tom Riddle had hidden the Locket, or so he thought, and where Regulus Black had met his end at the hands of the Inferi in the lake …

"They're rather too interested in that cave," Percy said.

"Given the dates on the werewolf queries, well, comparing against a timeline of New Year's… and I'm not sure we can't rule out that they were involved in the werewolf attack on Andromeda Tonks' house…" this was not looking good. This was not looking good at all.

"That cave's not an easy nut to crack," Percy said. "If I'm understanding right, the last person actually in there was Albus Dumbledore."

"But the Ministry has Dumbledore's papers…"

"I'd be surprised if there weren't heavy encryption on some of them," Percy said, with a significant look at her. Well, yes, she'd encrypted pretty much everything that she had written for her own use in the last three or four months in the world's time. And Dumbledore wouldn't have been one to take chances.

Still and yet …

"They'd be willing to risk quite a bit to get hold of that."

The referent didn't need to be specified: an army of Inferi. What Voldemort had unleashed in the first war, but had kept in reserve, apparently, in the second — to guard his Horcrux, she was quite sure.

Not that she was going to think about that, not just yet …

Bad enough that _Sectumsempra_ was abroad in the land as every thug's curse of choice in the post-war, without Horcruxes becoming common as land-mines.

No.

Bad enough, an army of the undead.

And the timeline didn't look promising, _at all._ She was going to have to get her parents released from their memory charm, and safely ensconced in this house, _well_ before the trials.

ooo

Now it was Percy who got the bit between his teeth, scribbling — and at some point he put the quill down, and said, "No, best to do it your way; there might be patterns in there that we'd like to see easily later…"

On into the night.

At some point, he started to nod out over the desk, and she dug into her blue beaded bag and found pyjamas, Ron's, well, you never knew when you'd need clothes that fit someone other than yourself, and there were towels and soap in the other room, and more than enough hot water.

He looked at the towels, and the pyjamas, with some skepticism, and she explained once more how it was she used this house, and how much time was stored in the locked rooms. "Nearly a month's worth."

"And food?"

"Oh, there's plenty of food in the kitchen," she said. "We just have to be careful to eat in shifts."

And pushed him in the direction of the shower, and bed.

She stood guard while he showered, feeling a distinct lack of sleep herself. No, not yet black spots in front of the eyes, or hallucinations, but when she closed her eyes, blackness threatened to swallow her.

Which must have been the reason that she started awake, hearing a sound in one of the other rooms. And definitely not in her right mind at all, wand out by instinct as if defending against an invader, turned the corner where the light was on in her old bedroom, and met—

—What, she didn't know, because the last word she heard was _Obliviate,_ in the split-second after which she would not remember.

ooo


	66. Chapter 66

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Hermione could not remember, but had the faintest sense, from her pounding heart, that something had scared her—

Scared her badly, but she could not remember what it had been. She could hear the shower running in the bathroom; yes, that was Percy in there, getting ready for bed. That she could remember, and the matter of their investigations, up to the moment that he had begun to fall asleep at his desk.

The house was silent. She held her breath and listened: not a sound.

Not a single sound, as if it were completely deserted.

She cast the spell nonetheless, to see who might be in those rooms.

No one, well, aside from herself and Percy. Several iterations, because they were in fact settled in for a long siege. There was the log to be read, once they had slept, and there was breakfast, and …

She would have to cast heavy protection around herself while she slept, just as at Grimmauld Place. She didn't entirely trust Percy not to attempt some sort of intervention with the time-turner. He'd already mentioned it once or twice, and she knew that wasn't idle talk. Anything Percy Weasley mentioned was an agenda item, and would be dealt with in good time.

Just not tonight, or any of its iterations.

Percy emerged from the shower, looking damp and flushed and pleasantly sleepy, his hair still on end from the drying spell. She flicked her own wand, warmed the bed, and he climbed in, made sure of his spectacles on the bedside table—

Yes, he slept with his wand, just as she did.

That was oddly reassuring. She wasn't the only one.

She warded the door, and checked once more for presences in the house—no one.

Took a brief hot shower, that unwound every muscle in quick succession—

She barely made it to the room to conjure herself a nice cozy bed, curtains and all (Hogwarts had made an impression on her, she decided) and properly ward it against intrusion, before she slid into the darkness.

The next day—well, the next day was not a day but another iteration with the time-turner. They'd get it all done in another twenty-four hours, she was quite sure.

That was her last waking thought.

ooo

There was coffee and tea, in the kitchen. She made note of the time. Nine o'clock on the morning of January the second, if she didn't mistake.

The pale light shone through, real sunlight. It helped to have a little dose of that, she thought, to keep cheerful. So she let them linger in the breakfast nook a bit, while she nursed her cup of strong coffee and the teapot poured out a second cup for Percy, and the eggs broke and whisked themselves with the chopped herbs and poured themselves into a quite respectable Provencal omelet. Percy nodded in approval as the kitchen filled with the warm scent of olive oil. In the morning light, he looked somewhat less grim, although she could see the scattered sparkle of silver among his red hair.

"It doesn't look good, not at all," he said. "So how far are we going to verify what's happening?"

"I'm going to need the full story," she said, "for our own purposes—and then we're going to figure out what will foil them in the short term, and just when the whole databank ought to go away."

He raised one eyebrow at the phrase "go away."

"And what do you mean by that?"

"Just what you think I might mean."

"You built that."

"And I can destroy it, which is going to be a necessity, I think." She added, "I'm not sure that we're even doing that in time." She stood and paced the kitchen, as the omelet finished itself and subdivided and slid out of the pan onto two separate plates, and the toast popped out of the toaster—

Her own mother had had nearly Molly Weasley's touch with getting everything to finish at once, though it was her father who worried about it.

"And then we're going to figure out how to get me to Australia. And Derwent." She looked at him, "and how to make it stick."

"If you're thinking—"

"Unbreakable Vow, yes. I don't trust Healer's Vow because I'm not sure how susceptible it is of interpretation, and I know exactly what I want, assuming that they survive the experience intact." She swallowed, turned away from him, ostensibly to check on the state of the coffee. "And particularly if they don't." She blinked the tears away, then turned to look into his eyes, and keep the contact for perhaps a moment longer than might be comfortable. "Have you ever served as a Bonder?"

"I know the procedure."

"Good." She poured herself another cup of coffee, and brought it to the table by hand, as Percy shepherded the plates with his wand.

There was no further conversation; they ate the excellent breakfast in silence, savoring the winter sunshine that they would shortly be leaving, to plunge into the nightfall of the evening before.

ooo

Into the night, which she had long since begun to consider its own country. Marking the time on the downstairs clock, as always, and timing their departure so that they would be safely ensconced in another room before their earlier counterparts arrived.

And made sure of the dishes in the kitchen first, of course, because it was rude to leave a mess for those coming later, and she'd have no one to be annoyed with but herself.

Percy was a good companion on those travels, and good-naturedly ducked his head to be encircled in the gold chain, as she turned the hourglass back the requisite number of turns.

As if he'd done this himself. And given the numbers of his OWLs and NEWTs, that might well be the case.

She'd inquire about that later; that might well be how he'd figured it out, because he knew what signs—

Well, if the rest of the Ministry could not read a timetable that was their problem…

Back to work, then. To the desk—and all of the rooms had desks now, and this one had a bed too. She conjured a second one, just before they began work.

ooo

On through the night, again. At least she had a good night's sleep, that's all she had to say. It was funny, working with another person, because the last time she'd really taken someone else with her was third year, and that was under direction.

No, there had been Draco, and then Neville — but that hadn't really been in the line of duty, particular not in Draco's case.

So, there was plenty to be cheerful about, though the missing moments of memory still bothered her. There had to be something …

What they found was worrisome enough. Percy frowned, and after some time, he was absently ruffling his hair with his left hand as he worked, looking more like a restless schoolboy than she ever remembered seeing him.

When she did glance up to see him, which was infrequently. She was busy stitching his findings into her own copy of the structure. Who, what, when, where, and to whom they were related. May as well put together as good a picture as possible of the conspiracy they were facing.

There was a new table that she dubbed UXBs.

Percy raised an eyebrow.

"Unexploded ordnance," she said. "Surely NEWT-level Muggle Studies reaches as far forward as the last World War."

"Truthfully, I never thought I was going to use it quite this way." He frowned. "On which subject, does that include diplomacy with Ten Downing Street?"

"What I can see of that… well, that's a separate table. This is artifacts and unfinished business from the late war. Giants, werewolves, Tom's cave of zombies …"

"Inferi," he corrected. He looked at his notes. "Your conjecture appears to have some merit. It does appear they're querying the database to see if there's something they can learn that's not in Dumbledore's papers and Pensieve records."

"Which I gather are not in the war crimes archive in their entirety."

"No. Some were released back to Hogwarts and some … appear to be in holding as yet." He said, "I'll have to track that when I'm back at the Ministry. I would suspect Department of Mysteries."

She made a note for herself, as well. "And what do you think they're doing with them?"

"If I knew that, I'd have to Obliviate you for asking." She jumped. "Joke. Unspeakables, you know. Seriously, no, there isn't any indication. I suspect they've hit a dead end, from the interest they're taking here."

"Dumbledore didn't leave much of a paper trail on that one, did he?"

"No. In fact, there's not much here except … well, you and Harry and Ron are the major source of information about Tom Riddle and his Horcrux collection. Scrumgeor didn't have much luck turning up any evidence on his agenda — and if _he_ didn't, there's nothing to indicate that his successors would have been any luckier."

"Is Kingsley's name on any of this?"

"No. All of the querents thus far are very far below Ministerial level, and very definitely not Kingsley's people in the least. They're answering to someone else." He sighed. "And I don't think that plan we discussed over Christmas is going to work out. They're finding much too much of interest in this archive to forestall it… well, except where it suits them. And that's nothing more than business as usual."

She conjured the latest join, the one with the timeline of the queries against suspicious actions, such as the targeted werewolf attacks — confirmed, in the case of her own, and conjectured, in the case of Andromeda Tonks. The attacks on wizarding enclaves she wasn't sure how to classify.

"So, based on this, how far along do you think their plans for Tom's cave have progressed?"

He frowned. "I'd say they've hit the point of striking the head against the blank wall. He pointed to another piece of the structure. "But they've other projects in play, and I think we might look at the maturity of those, because that's going to tell you how soon this whole business needs to 'go away.'" That with a grim little smirk and the fingers to indicate quotes.

ooo

Dawn was showing over the rooftops again. The second of January dawned for the second time —

No, the third time, because she had lived through that day once more. She couldn't remember exactly what the agenda had been, but that was moot; she'd look it up when she got a chance to take up her schedule book. It was a blur, and hard to remember any particular day, but the main point was that the house was full of time. Full of time, for all the days she had not been there. The first of January had been taken up with politicking, and the second … the second …

A jolt of panic ran through her. The second of January, she and Augusta Longbottom had Decommissioned this house. And who knows what —

She would have to avoid Augusta, and herself, because who knows what that magic would do to time-travelers.

She woke up with a start.

Full sunlight flooded into the room, and there were voices arguing downstairs.

Augusta Longbottom, among them.

"You can't let her fool about with that. We're in the middle of a Decommissioning, Percy. Get her out of there. It's dangerous enough."

"But I tried—"

"Don't try, succeed."

She expected at any moment to hear those feet on the stairs.

She closed her eyes.

Percy appeared a moment later.

"We have to get out, now."

No, he didn't need to explain. She grabbed him and looped the chain about their necks.

Not precisely calculated enough.

No, not at all.

She was face to face with herself, at wandpoint.

Her other self — in the dark — was pointing a wand straight at her. Unseeing eyes, yes, that's how she looked: pure reflex, on a killing trajectory. The very picture of the mad combat veteran, as she lifted the wand — as if it were a gun, yes, that's what Malfoy had meant, that her technique was Mugglish. She could hit a target from across the room, and this adrenalin-slowed double of herself was stepping forward to point the tip of it between her eyes, a few inches away, as if it were a handgun and she meant to blow her double's head off …

"Obliviate," Percy said, from behind her, grabbed her shoulder and whispered, "Apparate us out of here _now._"

She dropped the wards long enough to obey him. They were standing in a snowy field, yes, within sight of Longbottom House, presumably still on the second of January. She let out the breath she didn't even know that she was holding.

"I don't remember that," she said. "I don't remember that happening."

"Of course you don't," Percy said. "I Obliviated you."

"How much data did we lose?"

"Not much, I think. I got to be a dab hand with that spell during the war. And anyway I got the notes and your database. Nothing we want to be leaving about."

"So we're not going to be able to be here."

"No, I don't think so. I don't think we should keep doubling back. It's a bad, bad idea." He added, "And I saw some very interesting books in that house. Things you oughtn't to bring to Hogwarts. I can understand why you set up shop there …"

She kept her face as still as possible.

"Well, when I see the crest of Durmstrang, that's hint enough. _On the Banishing Rite._ Yes." He frowned. "And Delacour's treatise on the natural history of the Dementor. You're in deep water, deep …"

He sighed.

"It's cold out here. And it's still the second of January, and we need to get to the fourth."

"Well, I don't know where you were on the second of January …"

"Never mind." He said. "Let's get a room — across the border — and wait it out till we can Apparate back to Grimmauld Place. There are still a few unfinished questions." He shivered a bit, cast a warming charm against the rising wind, and squared his shoulders. "There's at least one Unspeakable in the Querents table."

ooo

The room, in an anonymous hotel not far from their usual luncheon place, proved satisfactory enough once she wove the protections to minimize damage to the electrical. She also expanded the sitting room, so that they wouldn't have to squint over a miniature version of the data structure. They were going to have to throw a few more connections across, do some more table joins …

… And try to guess, in the absence of further information, what threat might be posed by querents from the Department of Mysteries. They weren't on her side or Percy's, that much was clear.

And when the Banishing went through …

"Percy, have you ever considered quitting the Ministry?" she asked, and immediately regretted it.

"No," he said. "I have to be there to keep an eye on things." The look said, _to the very end, no matter how it turns out. _"For one thing, someone needs to arrange your transcontinental Portkey and your entrance papers for the Australian Ministry for Magic."

"But I haven't managed things on the other side of the border…"

"You won't need to." He said, "I've been in communication with the appropriate parties."

"Kingsley."

"No. The appropriate parties in Australia. Connections made during the war." He frowned. "I don't know what you're up to just now, but Bill's been put on a different detail by the Goblins, something very mum's-the-word, and your library is very suggestive. Very." He frowned and stared at the shifting colored patterns in the air before them. "I have very strong suggestions that some number of parties might be bound to silence." A pause. "By magical means, which I suspect you more than command."

She kept her face carefully neutral. He sighed, as if she were willfully missing the point — which she was.

"I think you need to include me in that binding. It's something that bears on the Ministry, and I have suspicions enough—"

She said, "What do you think I'm about?"

He looked about the room, and cast three or four layers of silencing, and then dropped his voice to a whisper.

"Trying to Banish the Dementors."

She felt her color drop and her hands go cold.

"The books. Keep that house warded and don't let _anyone_ see those books. Because if there's even a whiff of suspicion —"

He took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly as if he were afraid someone might hear him breathing.

"I don't think the Department of Mysteries has suspicions. Not yet. I think they've only been called in to consult on the question of the cave."

She stood. "You cannot speak. You must keep faith."

He sighed a little as she lowered her wand, and smiled appreciatively. "Very nice. Derwent, right?" She blinked. "Augusta said she was a bit of a show-off, from schooldays onward. Drove Minerva McGonagall absolutely _mad_ that Boudicca didn't have to resort to Latin. I think it began as some sort of schoolgirl bet, but it certainly came in useful in the Grindelwald Wars."

"How soon will you be able to get me to Australia?"

"As soon as I can. I certainly concur with you that this is urgent."

"Before the trials?"

"Given what we just saw, _well_ before. Be prepared to travel on very short notice." He narrowed his eyes. "Even if it conflicts with the NEWTs."

She hoped it wouldn't come to that.

ooo


End file.
